Welcome to 2025: keeping New Year’s Day with Mary, the Mother of God
Fr David Howell• January 1, 2025
The LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them. (Numbers 6:25-27)
The Church offers us this ancient blessing for the solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, on the eighth day after Christmas, New Year’s Day. Jesus, like all Jewish boys, was circumcised and named eight days after birth, so the Lord’s reference to “my name” in the blessing is fitting for this feast, and the prayer also asks for a glimpse of the Lord’s face.
But the Jews’ rarely-spoken name of God and his ever-veiled face are transformed in Jesus: we can see the face of God made flesh in the Christ Child and invoke His name with affectionate familiarity. We can imagine Mary drawing back the swaddling clothes to reveal her baby’s face and telling the shepherds his name with loving wonder. As the child grew, the similarity between His face and Mary’s, would have become noticeable for she really is His mother and He really is God.
His name means “God saves”, and so that face will be bruised and blinded by blood, then radiant once more on Easter morning: God has been born to save us by His death and rising.
Circumcision seems to have been a redeeming punishment for Abraham’s adultery with his slave, Hagar: the sinful member was permanently marked to show God’s ownership of the whole person. Jesus, despite His sinlessness, submits to this ritual.
On another “eighth day” He will receive other permanent marks on His body to show He belongs to his Father: Jesus rose with his glorious scars on the “first day of the week”, and so it was the “eighth day” too. And, as Archbishop John Wilson has said, Jesus, like us all, had another permanent mark to show He belonged to his mother: His navel.
Yet despite the utter reality of Mary’s motherhood, today’s feast also highlights the miraculous nature of Jesus’ birth. In the preface we hear that Mary delivered her son “without losing the glory of virginity” and the special part in the Eucharistic Prayer says that “the undefiled virginity of Mary brought forth” the baby Jesus: Mariæ intemerata virginitas […] edidit.
At one level, this supernatural birth would have protected Mary from the fate Rachel suffered: she died after delivering Benjamin while on a similar journey and was buried at Bethlehem, with a “special rock” on her grave to honour her, which “is still there today” (Genesis 35:19-21). How worried Joseph would have been if he had seen that rock on their way.
This mysterious miracle is beautifully described by Fr Fabio Rosini in San Giuseppe: Accogliere, Custodire e Nutrire (2021): “Mary is also Virgin in the act of giving birth. This seems really absurd. Someone might say: but how can a baby come out without rupturing the hymen of his mother? Interesting: one who is born of a virgin; who rises from the dead; who makes the dumb speak and the deaf hear; one who heals lepers and a series of other things. Is He not able to come out of His mother’s womb leaving her intact?
One might say that these are fixations: something “devotionalistic”, mythologising, absurd. Instead this is something important: the works of God are born from God and are brought to completion according to God. Joseph goes on discovering little by little how God arranges his mission, and must remain a “protected-protector”; in other words one who is always in the hand of God. It is not enough to have obeyed the Angel the first time, he will have to obey many other times. It is God who saves the baby, and each time Joseph must discover how, with the Angel’s help.
Saint Vincent de Paul, one of the greatest saints of charity, a man who did and organised thousands of acts of service and of love, used to say something which I like to repeat: ‘The things of God happen by themselves.’ When you do the things of God, you discover that they move by themselves, that you receive much more than you give, that they go at a rhythm that surprises you; they carry you, you don’t carry them. Don’t you believe this? I have done the diagnosis for you: have you never lived this experience? You see that up to now you have only done ‘your’ things.
Whoever has entered upon a work of God knows that this is brought to completion in virginity; you cannot boast of it, you are much more a spectator than an agent.”
Photo: A statue of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus stands at the site of the Marist Brothers charitable association in Aleppo, Syria, 12 December 2024. (Photo by OZAN KOSE/AFP via Getty Images.)