Holy Mary, Disciple of the Lord: A Dogmatic-Liturgical Analysis

Holy Mary, Disciple of the Lord: A Dogmatic-Liturgical Analysis

On this 4th day of the Novena to Our Lady of Aparecida, we celebrate the Mass “Holy Mary, Disciple of the Lord.” It is a title as old as time, and as new as the light of each day. 

Mary hears the Word, fulfills the promise, makes herself available to the Father’s will, and is the Mother of Jesus. In all this she is the model of the disciple. 

Why?

The disciple is the one who listens to the Word, in the Spirit in which it was written, within the Church. This is what discipleship consists in. And Mary? At the Annunciation she listened to the Word, the Spirit came down upon her, and she went, as the nascent Church, to bring the good news to Elizabeth.

But today the readings go even deeper in speaking of the disciple of the Teacher of the disciples: the Book of Ben Sira speaks of Wisdom, asked for in the Sanctuary, and therefore in the presence of God. And the more she flourished, the more the joy grew: imagine how the angel addressed her at the Annunciation: kekaritomene, which means something like this: she who has received karis, that is, grace, from the past, and continues to receive it in the fullness of having been chosen and of responding to this predestination from all eternity.

Wisdom offers herself to those who listen to her; she gives us understanding, moves our hearts, is the most precious good, and leads us to glorify God. This is what the disciple does, just like Mary:

• Listens to the Word and is Mother of the incarnate Word
• Moves us to the point of making us agile and practical, carrying everything forward so that the proclamation of the Gospel may reach its destination
• Leads us to gather all things together and to seek their real meaning, which is often not explicit. And this brings us to the Gospel…

We read the very famous passage of the loss and finding of the child Jesus in the Temple. So far nothing new, but as always we find two elements. The first: the endeavor, in the Sanctuary, to fulfill the precepts of the Hebrew Law. The Holy Family begins as a Hebrew family, but Jesus fulfills the precept of coming of age. At Passover He is found after three days, a foreshadowing of Easter. After being found, He answers that He was doing the Father’s will. At the resurrection, after being found, He answers Mary of Magdala in the same way: do not hold on to me, for I must go to my Father.

And what of Mary, before this event in the life of Jesus and the Words that were spoken? 

She asks: why? The Son answers; she did not understand, but she kept all these events in her heart.

Here again we have the core of discipleship: to gather, to keep, and to ponder all the meanings of the mystery of salvation that the Master reveals to the disciple.

Let us try to define the disciple: the one who responds to God’s proposal. Mary responds to God’s proposal at the Annunciation before all of us, before all the apostles. She follows Jesus, does not understand the revealed mystery, and in the end… keeps in memory what will one day make sense.

The Mother becomes a disciple, follows the Son, is with the Apostles, and remains faithful at the crucial moments in the history of Salvation that God chose to design with her at each stage, seeking His will in order to put it into practice, and all this through meditation on the mysteries. Without this, we are merely good people in search of a more caring, fraternal, and just world, but even without God this can be achieved. 

What makes us different is that we respond concretely each day to God’s proposal revealed through Jesus, who came to do the Father’s will. Where this leads us, we do not know, but we know what the ultimate destination is: let it be done to me according to your Word!

To deepen the analysis of Mary as the perfect disciple of the Lord, consult John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Mater, which presents Mary as a model of faith and discipleship for the whole Church.

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