“One bread, one body”: The Most Holy Name of Mary and the fruit that reveals the tree

“For there is one bread, one body, though we are many, and all who partake of one bread are one. For just as each tree is recognized by its fruit, so too each person is recognized by his works.” (1 Corinthians 10:17 and Luke 6:44)

The Saturday of Week XXIII of Ordinary Time is also the day on which the Church can celebrate the Memorial of the Most Holy Name of Mary. The readings for the day fall upon this memorial with notable appropriateness. Paul explains that the broken bread makes many one body and that one cannot partake of two incompatible tables. Jesus says that each tree is known by its fruit and that the mouth speaks what overflows from the heart. A name, like a fruit, is not invented; it declares what the tree is.

I. The first reading: 1 Corinthians 10:14-22

Paul addresses the same issue as in the previous days, the meat sacrificed to idols, but now he delves deeper into the matter and the result is one of the oldest pages on the Eucharist in the New Testament. The rhetorical question forms the core: “Is not the cup of blessing which we bless, a participation in the Blood of Christ? Is not the bread which we break, a participation in the Body of Christ?” (v.16). It was written around the year 56, before any Gospel, and it already assumes an established practice and fixed vocabulary.

From this Paul draws the ecclesial consequence that the tradition has never abandoned: “since there is one bread, we who are many are one body, because we participate in the one bread” (v.17). The unity of the Church is not a consensus among like-minded people, but the effect of a common food. And from this comes the ultimate demand, which is the reason for all his argumentation: “you cannot drink from the cup of the Lord and from the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the Lord’s table and of the table of demons” (v.21). Communion is not an opinion that is added to others, but a belonging that excludes contrary belongings.

II. The Gospel: Luke 6:43-49

Luke concludes his Sermon on the Plain with two verification criteria. The first is botanical: “each tree is known by its fruit” (v.44). The second is linguistic and even more unsettling, because it hits what we least suspect: “the mouth speaks what the heart overflows with” (v.45). What we say when we are not composing an answer is the most faithful inventory of what we have inside.

Then comes the question that sets the tone for the whole conclusion: “why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I say?” (v.46). And the parable of the two houses, which in Luke has a detail that Matthew does not have. The prudent man “dug, and dug deep, and laid the foundations on the rock” (v.48). The decisive work is what is not seen and gives no pleasure to do, because it consists in digging down while others are already building walls. The flood does not distinguish the two houses by appearance. It distinguishes them by what was done before there was a house.

III. The fruit that reveals the tree

The two texts share a method, which is that of verification by effect. Paul verifies faith by the table at which the person sits. Jesus verifies it by the fruit the tree bears and by what the mouth lets slip.

Neither of them accepts self-declaration as proof.

Applied to a life of devotion, this criterion is severe. It is possible to attend the Lord’s table and maintain a real belonging to another table, and inconsistency is not resolved by the intensity of religious feeling, but by choice. How is it possible to build a whole spiritual life in height, with visible practices and correct vocabulary, without ever having dug to the rock? The flood, Luke says, reaches both houses equally. It is not proof that distinguishes Christians, but the foundation.

IV. The Most Holy Name of Mary: a name that is the fruit

Today’s memory is ancient in devotion and recent in its present form. Born in Spain in the 16th century, it was extended to the whole Church by Innocent XI in 1683, after Vienna, removed from the calendar in the 1969 reform and restored as an optional memory in the Missal promulgated by John Paul II. The Church wanted to keep a day for what the faithful do every day without thinking, which is to pronounce that name.

Today’s Gospel explains why it makes sense to celebrate a name. If “the mouth speaks what the heart overflows with,” then the names a community repeats say what that community has inside. And if “every tree is known by its fruit,” then it is fitting to remember what fruit that tree bore. The Latin liturgy sings it in the Salve Regina when addressing her and asking that she show us, after this exile, “the blessed fruit of thy womb.” The name of Mary does not stand for itself. It stands because it points to the fruit.

And here is where the first reading completes a circle that devotion does not always recognize. The Body that Paul says is communion, the bread that makes many one body, is a body that was taken from a concrete woman. The Son of God was born of a woman (Gal 4:4), and the Church confesses Mary as the true Mother of God and of the Redeemer (Lumen Gentium 53). The flesh that is received at the altar entered the world through her consent. That is why devotion to her name is never a deviation from the Eucharist, if understood properly, because it leads back to the point where the Word became flesh.

Saturday of Week XXIII therefore leaves two verifications to be made, and neither of them is answered with words. Where do we sit at table when no one is looking, and what does our mouth say when we are not watching?

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