How should we, with Mary, open ourselves to Christ, to meet God?

Yes, we rejoice in calling her blessed. Yet, we are also bound to align ourselves with her and, to the extent possible, revive within us the way in which she, in faith and poverty, opened herself to God to receive Jesus Christ, and with her, became a new reconciled people, that is, became the Church for the world. It is necessary to meditate on these points in detail: we must say the Magnificat not only with our voices, but also with our lives, especially with our lives.With Mary’s faithOpen to us, through Mary, to Christ, in whom God reconciles us to Himself. What does this mean spiritually?First of all, to see the historical reality, both total and personal, in the biblical perspective. God guides history, and it is necessary to have faith in God: to believe in God, to believe in God.To believe in God. I do not believe that atheism should be discussed in principle here: it must be rejected. Whoever adheres to such atheism does not even remotely imagine the possibility of tuning in with Mary. For him, Mary is, at most, a simple woman like any other. But there is a certain practical agnosticism that can also touch those who are Christians. Secularism, so widespread today, can favor this agnosticism: living as if God and Christ did not exist. At most, one turns to Christ in extreme cases, when death is about to put an end to our history. In these cases, there can be forms of recourse to Christ and the saints that have something magical about them. But it takes much more than that. Yet, God’s mercy, in reconciling us, has no limits.To believe in God. Elizabeth said to Mary, alluding to her faith: «Blessed are those who believe that what was said to them will be fulfilled». Besides believing in God, one must also believe in God’s Word, place one’s trust in Him, and regulate one’s life according to God’s Word.This is a fundamental and decisive behavior for reconciliation. Jesus, in his preaching, continually affirmed the need for this faith in God. I recall two moments of this doctrine: once, when he speaks of reconciliation. Another time, when he speaks implicitly, precisely, of Mary.On reconciliation as the conversion of the whole person to God, Christ spoke, as we are told in the Gospel of Mark, at the very beginning of his preaching: (Mt 4, 17) «Come near, then, and listen: all that was prophesied by Isaiah the prophet is being fulfilled in you. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to announce the year of the Lord’s grace».Exegetes note that, in practice, the gospel was Christ himself. It must also be noted that Jesus makes a direct appeal to time, kairós, as an intense and maximum moment of salvation history, which coincides with the moment of the people of God’s reconciliation. But the people did not believe, except for the «Remnant», as he himself will say: (Lc 10, 21) «I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and revealed them to the little ones».Here are the English translations of the provided text:The wise and intelligent among us are those who, instead of converting themselves according to the Word of God, convert the Word of God and Christ Himself to their own cultural categories and models. And here, too, we must note how Jesus exalts the faith of the “poor of YHWH,” who constituted the “remnant” of Israel, those who were becoming the true new people of God. They believe in the gospel and change their mindset: they open themselves to the reconciliation that God works in Christ.Once again, Jesus refers to this faith in the Word of God, believed with fidelity, alluding implicitly to Mary’s faith. The incident is recorded. Saint Luke writes: (Luke 11:28) “While Jesus was still speaking, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you.’ But Jesus said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.'”That is, they keep it in its authenticity, meditating on it and putting it into practice. This was Mary’s way, as Luke himself says: to meditate on the events of Jesus, filled with teaching, and on his words: (Luke 2:19) “Mary, meanwhile, kept all these words and pondered them in her heart.”With Mary’s silenceTo open ourselves, with Mary, to Christ, in whom God reconciles us with Himself, in addition to aligning ourselves with Mary’s faith, we must also become small, simple. We must, to the best of our ability, be able to say with Mary: God looks upon our humble condition, upon our accepted poverty, far from any veil of pride, of egoistic self-possession, of ostentation, content to be overlooked, making silence our usual word.The entire gospel speaks of Mary’s silence. She lets others serve Jesus and give Him what is His, as Luke himself testifies (Luke 8:3).Here is the English translation of the provided text:I recall a reflection that the lawyer Carnelutti made at a conference some forty years ago. He said: What was the profound pain that Mary felt when she heard Jesus say to those who wanted to follow him (Lk 9:58): “The foxes have their holes and the birds of the sky their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” For a mother, not being able to provide a home for her son is a great sorrow. Now, she accepted this pain in her state of poverty and need, not just material but also spiritual: “She regarded her daughter’s turmoil.” The reason for the Son’s isolation, and thus his inability to have a home, was the discrimination that the leaders of Israel imposed on the poor, the simple, the “Remnant,” of which Mary was a part with her Son.Is it possible today, in our time, to experience a state of discrimination for being faithful to God’s Word and to his friendship? Not only is it possible, but it exists and becomes ever more vast and poignant. There is a great multitude of those who find themselves living the Beatitudes proclaimed by the Lord within themselves.God certainly does not want there to be discriminations; he wants everyone to say, “Our Father who art in heaven, and let them all be brothers.” He certainly encourages and rewards those who work to end discriminations. However, in fact, the “poor people” who must suffer for being ridiculed by their very condition, as if they were incapable, will always exist due to human malice. Therefore, it is necessary to always have the courage to remain faithful to true dignity, even when one is in a state of discrimination, socially despised poverty. This is a difficult speech to give today. A dominant culture prevails that preaches and imposes a conversion contrary to the conversion preached by Christ. Yet, despite all this, it is necessary to be faithful to Christ and preach the true conversion, the true reconciliation, without violence, in the style of Christ and his Mother.Contemplating Jesus More IntimatelyA third thing is required for us to open ourselves to Christ, with Mary, in whom God reconciles us with himself: to contemplate and recognize Jesus. The most decisive reason that concerns us here is this: only Jesus can reveal to us who God truly is, only Jesus can help us reconcile with God.The Gospel of John begins with this affirmation: (Jn 1:18) “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the Father’s side, he has made him known.”The same Gospel of John narrates that Jesus, at the Last Supper, answered the apostle Thomas who said to him: “Lord, we do not know where you are going.” (Jn 14:5-7) “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will also know my Father.”Now ye know him, and have seen him. The apostle Philip must have thought that, despite all, they did not seem to see the Father. Therefore, he said to Jesus: “Lord, show us the Father, and it will be enough for us.” Jesus answered: (Jo 14, 8-10) “Philip, I have been with you all this time, and thou knowest me not? He that seeth me, seeth the Father. How then sayest thou, Shew us the Father? Dost not thou believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto you, I speak not after my own, but the Father that abideth in me, he doeth his works.”These last statements are the key to understanding the Lord’s discourse: all the words he spoke and all the works he did are the words and works of the Father, in Christ, his Minister, in full union of life. This means that the book to know God the Father, who reconciles us with him, is the Gospel. Every page of the Gospel speaks of God the Father. Every work of Jesus is the work of the Father.What, then, is the life of Jesus? He himself says, speaking to Nicodemus: it is the manifestation of God the Father’s love for the world: (Jo 3, 16) “God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”To be delivered from destruction, to have everlasting life, which is the very life of God, is nothing other than the work of reconciliation. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them,” Paul already told us (2Cor 5, 19).How did Jesus conduct himself towards sinners? The Gospel of Luke tells us: (Lc 15, 1-2) “The tax-gatherers and sinners drew near to him to hear him. The Pharisees and the doctors of the law murmured, saying, He receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.”And after saying these words, he spoke of the shepherd who goes in search of the lost sheep, and then of the father of the prodigal son. These are the pages that, two thousand years ago, revealed to the world who God is in Jesus Christ, to whom, even though the world is contaminated by sin, anyone can still hope to be forgiven and regain friendship with God.Another reflection on this so important point, which reveals to what extent Christ’s mercy has reconciled the sinner with God. I evoke a solemn moment of this reconciliation, in which Mary was also present, intimately united to the Son at that time. I refer to the conversion of the repentant thief on the cross, beside Jesus.He said that it is necessary to know and recognize Jesus to know him, that he comes to us to reconcile us and open us to him. Let us observe the conduct of the thief who then repents. When he arrived dragged to Calvary, he did not know Jesus. It is difficult to think that he was religiously prepared, even if Mark’s statement, that both thieves insulted Jesus (Mk 15:32), extends to both what was only of the unrepentant thief, as some exegetes believe. He, therefore, even suffering on the cross, is touched by Jesus’ conduct, begins to know him, confronts his own conduct with Jesus’, repents, and opens himself to God who comes to him with his love. This is repentance and prayer: “Remember me in your kingdom.” And Jesus gives him his friendship and that of the Father, opening his kingdom to him: (Lk 23:39-43) “Today you will be with me in paradise.”And Mary is there, suffering and praying.Christ helps us reconcile with GodThe Gospel of John tells us that, on the afternoon of Easter, the risen Jesus, while the apostles were locked away for fear, came with the doors closed and there was great joy among the apostles. Then Jesus gave them peace for the second time, breathed on them, and said: (Jn 20:21-23) “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain them, they are retained.”Thus, as the Council of Trent affirms, he instituted the sacrament of penance.Notice how both the last act of Jesus on the cross and the first act as the Risen One are reconciliation and the forgiveness of sins. It is also necessary to note that when he communicates the Holy Spirit to the apostles, he emphasizes what should be the true dynamic that generates in the soul the new life, erasing sins that are no longer imputed to the sinner. It is certainly the priest who absolves, but the priest is merely a ministerial instrument of the redeeming virtue that flows from the Risen Christ. And the humanity of Christ, dead on the cross and risen, teaches Saint Thomas, operates in turn as the principal minister of God, the only one who can forgive sins, because he is the only one from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds and, therefore, the sanctifying grace (Saint Thomas Aquinas, *Summa Theologiae* III, 62, 1; 64, 1).Therefore, it is Jesus, while risen, who, by the strength of his death on the cross, victorious over sin and over our death, takes the sinner inwardly by baptism and the divine movement of the Holy Spirit and transforms him from sinner to penitent. Thus, through absolution, he sanctifies him and reintroduces him into the communion of his mystical body, which is the Church.It is Saint Thomas Aquinas who teaches all this with truth. And in this sense, I said that Jesus helps us reconcile with God: he helps us transforming us inwardly into the new life of true friends of God.Uniting ourselves more and more to the charity of Mary, who cooperates in the birth of the faithful in the ChurchI said that on the Cross, while Christ reconciled with God the repentant thief, Mary was present. Passively? The sound theology tells us that she was in absolute harmony with the Son’s love for humanity. And love, at that time, led Jesus to accept the death inflicted on him, not passively, but by taking it to transform it into the death of sin and the death of man himself, and thus reconcile the entire humanity with God. It is clear that Mary’s love for her Son suffered, and at the same time, she accepted his death with the same tension of the *fiat* said at the moment of the Incarnation. In essence, in the Son’s death, she felt her own death as well. And with the Son, she made the same prayer to the Father: “Father, forgive him, for he does not know what he is doing.”It is Saint Augustine who sees in Mary’s charity of love this intention of eclesial and salvific cooperation of all her life with the Son.Saint Alphonse assumes these words from the renowned Nicole: «As it was properly on the Cross that Jesus Christ formed His Church, it is clear that the holy Virgin cooperated in an excellent and singular way in this formation. Thus, she began, on the Cross, to be in a particular way the Mother of the whole Church» (Nicole, *Theological and Moral Instructions on the Lord’s Prayer, the Angelic Salutation, etc.*, Third Instruction, Chapter 2).And Saint Alphonse concludes: «To say it all in a few words, the Most Holy God, to glorify the Mother of the Redeemer, determined and arranged that her great charity should pray for all those for whom her divine Son paid and offered the superabundant price of his precious blood, in which is our salvation, life, and resurrection» (Saint Alphonse de Ligori, *The Glories of Mary*, «*A Warning to the Reader*»).ConclusionTo open ourselves to Christ with Mary, to go to meet God, is not to add a parallel path to the unique Mediator, but to enter, with spiritual reality, into the concrete way in which God Himself willed to conduct the history of reconciliation. Mary’s faith is not a devotional ornament: it is a model, and even more, a form and ecclesial way of embracing God’s *kairós*, the full time in which the Kingdom draws near and calls to conversion (Mt 1:20-21). Therefore, calling Mary blessed is not enough if the blessedness does not become a demand: to listen to the Word, keep it, and live it, as Christ declares is the true greatness of his disciples, and as Mary’s own life confirms (Lk 1:28, Lk 2:19). Reconciliation begins, then, in the place where the Gospel always places it: in obedient faith, which believes in God and believes God, and which adjusts life to the Word, without converting the Word to our categories.This opening, however, cannot take place without silence, that is, without interior poverty that accepts being small before God. Mary’s silence is not absence but consent, availability, and timid without ostentation. It is the space in which the person gives up self-possession to be possessed by God, and thus can receive the reconciling Christ. In a time when dominant culture often pushes for a conversion contrary to Christ’s, Mary’s silence becomes an evangelical resistance: faithfulness without violence, firmness without arrogance, perseverance without bitterness. It is in this timidity that the Beatitudes cease to be an abstract ideal and become a way of being: the serene courage to remain timid, faithful, simple, even when it involves discrimination and loss of prestige.But the decisive point, without which everything would dissolve into moralism, is this: to open oneself to Christ requires encountering and re-encountering him. Only he reveals who God is, because in him the words and deeds are those of the Father. The Gospel, therefore, is not just a text to read but the living book in which God reveals himself as mercy that reconciles, as a Father who seeks, forgives, and restores friendship. This is why reconciliation is not just an inner feeling but a real passage from death to life: the sinner, touched by Christ’s presence, learns to say the prayer of repentance and receives the promise of definitive communion (Lk 23:39-43). Similarly, the Resurrected makes reconciliation the first paschal gesture for the Church, communicating the Holy Spirit and entrusting him with the ministry of forgiveness (Jn 20:21-23): forgiveness is not a human act isolated but an action of the risen Christ who, inwardly, recreates the heart and reintegrates the faithful into the communion of his Body, the Church.In this context, it is understood why Mary’s charity, united with the charity of the Son, is not a passive presence on the Cross. It is full harmony with the redeeming love, maternal consent to the Son’s oblation, and thus, ecclesiastic cooperation: there, where Christ forms the Church, Mary enters in a unique way into the spiritual motherhood of the reconciled people. Thus, Mary’s opening to Christ does not end in a private experience, but flows into a communal and missionary reality: to become a new people, that is, the Church for the world. And the Magnificat, then, ceases to be merely a song and becomes a program: to proclaim, with life, that God knocks down the idols of pride and raises up the small, making poverty welcomed the place where reconciliation begins to generate a new history.In short, reconciliation with God, in Christ, demands from us what first shone in Mary: faith that surrenders, silence that welcomes, the living presence of Jesus, and charity that offers itself. Whoever enters this path discovers that reconciliation is not only a return to the past, but a birth into the future: new life in the Spirit, ecclesiastic communion, and courage to live, in the midst of the world, as a true friend of God.Continue this reflection on Mary and reconciliation: Mary in Christ reconciles us with ourselves and With Mary for a reconciled Christian community. To deepen Mary’s role in Christian faith, consult the encyclical Redemptoris Mater: Mary, the way to Christ.

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