The disciple who believes invites us to listen to the Word

The disciple who believes invites us to listen to the Word

Mary at Cana invites us to listen to the Word: she is an attentive woman, who observes, scrutinizes, admonishes. She knows how to find her bearings, she knows whom to ask. She shows herself as one who is known, she is aware of the Son’s role and of her own role. She is timely, she acts at once: she has the grace of punctuality. She possesses competence regarding Christ: she knows that she can ask him for a miracle. She also knows the servants (the lesser children) and knows what to say to them: she knows how to ask of them availability, trust, obedience, openness to the miracle. Mary at Cana exhorts us to trust in the Son and in his words:

“Do whatever he tells you”. (Jn 2:5). 

After having said to Jesus “They have no more wine”, Mary received from him a somewhat harsh and enigmatic reply: “What is there between me and you, woman? My hour has not yet come” (Jn 2:4). It is a reply that indicates a divergence between Jesus and his mother. The one speaks of material wine, the other of the full revelation that will be manifested at an hour established exclusively by the Father. This situation, however, does not trouble Mary, accustomed as she was to keeping and meditating on what she did not understand, patiently awaiting the full revelation, which for her too would be the third day of the resurrection. 

Mary, so to speak, stands between the third day of Cana and the third day of the resurrection: she lives this meantime with trust and transmits it to the servants, carrying out a role of maternal mediation in imitation of the work of mediation accomplished by Moses at Sinai. “We will do what he tells you” is the testament of the Virgin Mother: Mary teaches Christ in the very etymological sense, she points him out, points to him, and leads to him, because as a mother she knows the access to his heart above all else. “Do and let do”. 

This is the prophetic synthesis of Mary’s counsel: “Do” (this is the action to be undertaken). “Whatever he tells you”. Mary does not, of herself, point out solutions to the problem that arose at the wedding of Cana, but refers to Christ. She turns aside from herself in order to lead to obedience to what Christ “will say”. Mary was born teaching: she does not keep it for herself. Today teachers are lacking: to be a winner of approval is something other than being a teacher. Mary is a teacher because she teaches Christ: she points to him, she leads to him, she asks obedience to him.

Mary at Cana, as throughout her whole existence, believed in the knowledge of the miracle, always keeping herself far from a providentialism that would deprive her of responsibility. In this way she showed a great balance between opposing dynamisms: on the one hand, the motivating certainty that God does everything. On the other hand, the responsible awareness of her obedient collaboration. 

The first dynamism makes her believe that everything is owed to God (the principle of humility). The second makes her take up the position of a chosen creature who, nevertheless, is not exempt from corresponding, with personal commitment, to divine grace (the principle of synergy). Mary bears witness that she knows how to balance the primacy of God’s lordship and the duty of human collaboration.

Taking up again the practice of the virtue of listening in Christian experience becomes indispensable, on pain of the failure of the whole experience of discipleship. The cry of filiation begins the secret life of grace in the hearts of men, in which the Spirit maintains, as interior master, a school of the Gospel, requiring silence and listening.

God’s silent communication results in a new silence as contemplation and response of faith. It is the complex experience of faith, which can be summed up entirely as acceptance of the Word and response to it, and which is essentially an experience of silence.

The disciple who believes educates for wisdom beginning from listening

In the Babel of our time, no one listens to anyone. No one has time to listen to another, not even those who love him. In a civilization of noise and shouting such as ours, the space for authentic listening is inevitably reduced to minimal levels. The capacity to listen to one’s neighbor, but also to oneself, is therefore weakened, numbed, diminished. The mass media, besides having contributed to bringing about the death of silence, have also made the men of the twentieth century incapable of full listening, of radical listening.

The refusal to listen must be attributed in large part to the destruction of silence, to the flood of banal, weightless, and inexpressive words and messages that have produced:

• the death of silence.
• intellectual narcosis.
• the lack of love for listening.

Beginning again with the wisdom of silence 

We should never have fallen into the Gehenna of noise that afflicts and stuns our time, but now that we are there we must at least commit ourselves to coming out of it by seeking new paths that lead to the city of silence and by persevering on these paths.

The man of today is in search of a lasting silence capable of weaving together his whole existence, for a passing silence disturbs him. In order to be able to possess silence and to be possessed by it, there is no other way than to follow the path of education. Among the small and great spiritual itineraries of man (beauty, love, the cosmos, life), one must count silence, which in a manifold and profound way acts within man: it defends, corrects, purifies, nourishes.

Silence brings all this about by creating spaces, creating roots, giving heart to the educational action that, in the various stages of ongoing formation, reaches man’s interior in order to make him express himself, to make him grow, to make him open to the breath of values. Silence, by its structural and inextricable rootedness in the most intimate core of man, is also capable of building an effective defense around the spiritual, artistic, and cultural life. In fact, it contains antibodies capable of resisting the virulent attacks that come from the contagious manifestations of the dissipated life, which occurs when one closes oneself to hearing the voice of Being and gives oneself over, in an act of true prostitution, to the strident and to the violent voices of utilitarianism, of efficiency, and of the ephemeral.

In Babel we are saved by keeping silence. Silence creates a curtain of defense around the human spirit, it soundproofs the heart of man against the deafening pressure of the passions that disturb him and can disturb him to the point of pushing him to the edge of abysses from which it is difficult to come out. 

To deepen your reflection on Mary as the disciple who listens and invites us to the Word, consult the encyclical Redemptoris Mater of John Paul II, which presents Mary as the perfect believer whose faith invites the whole Church to listen to the Word.

Deepen your studies: explore Mariology, Marian Theology, Marian apparitions, and the Postgraduate Program in Mariology.