Christian Art | Holy Mary | King James Audio Bible | KJV | Love Revealed By Jesus Christ
Luke 11: 27-28 – Week 27 Ordinary Time, Saturday (King James Audio Bible KJV, Spoken Word)
27 ¶ And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.
28 But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.
The woman raises her voice to praise Mary, for Jesus’ sake. Through Jesus, the woman is moved to acclaim the holiness of Mary. It can be true to say also that very many Christians are moved to contemplate Mary through knowledge of Jesus. For many Christians, Mary is our spiritual mother. Through Jesus, we discover our relationship with Mary, and so reciprocally through Mary we discover and seek to imitate the Son.
In response, Jesus highlights Mary’s ‘Yes!’ to God. Mary said: ‘Be it done unto me according to thy word.’ Here is a model of complete humility and obedience to God.
We hear little of Mary through much of the course of the Gospels. Some of what we read may seem strange, as when Mary and Jesus’ family come to try to speak with Jesus, concerned that Jesus is mad. It is also striking when Mary seems perfectly in tune with Jesus’ mission, as for example when Jesus is on the Cross.
Such relative silence, between infancy narratives and the Cross, may be illustrative of Mary’s perfect humility. It was through this perfection that Mary conceived of the Holy Spirit the Son.
Concluding Prayer | Love Revealed By Jesus Christ
Lord God,
source and origin of our salvation,
make our lives here on earth so proclaim your glory,
that we ay praise you without ceasing in heaven.
We make our prayer through our Lord.
King James Audio Bible | Endnotes
Hail Mary, Mother Of God
The title ‘Mother of God’ is a longstanding and deeply meaningful term used by many Christians to refer to Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. While the phrase ‘Mother of God’ does not appear in the Bible, there are many passages that support this understanding of Mary’s role in salvation history.
One such passage is Luke 1:43, in which Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, greets Mary with the words: ‘And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’ (KJV) The phrase ‘my Lord’ (Greek kyrios) is a common title for God in the Old Testament, and Elizabeth’s use of it to refer to Jesus suggests that she saw him as divine. This would make Mary the mother of God in the fullest sense of the term.
Another important passage is John 1:1-14, which describes Jesus as the Word of God made flesh. Verse 14 states: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.’ (KJV) By giving birth to Jesus, who is the Word made flesh and the only begotten of the Father, Mary can be understood as the mother of God.
The Gospel of Matthew also contains several references to Mary as the mother of Jesus, who is God in human form. In Matthew 1:23, an angel tells Joseph that the child to be born to Mary ‘shall be called Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us’ (KJV). This name emphasizes the divine nature of Jesus and reinforces the idea that Mary is the mother of God.
In addition to these biblical passages, the early Church Fathers also wrote extensively about Mary’s role as the mother of God. For example, in the 2nd century, the theologian Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote that Jesus ‘was truly born of a virgin, and was truly crucified…He was also truly raised from the dead…Mary was truly of the seed of David’ (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, chapter 1). This statement affirms both the humanity and divinity of Jesus, and by extension, Mary’s role as the mother of God.
In the 5th century, the Council of Ephesus officially affirmed the title ‘Mother of God’ for Mary, declaring that ‘the holy virgin is the mother of God, because she bore according to the flesh the Word of God made flesh’ (session 3). This council was convened to address the heresy of Nestorianism, which denied the unity of Christ’s divine and human natures, and the affirmation of Mary as the mother of God was a key part of the council’s teaching.
In more recent times, both Catholic and Protestant theologians have continued to affirm Mary’s unique role as the mother of God. The Catholic Church, for example, teaches that Mary’s ‘divine motherhood…is the source of her extraordinary dignity’ and that ‘the Church venerates her as the Mother of God, and also as Queen of Heaven and earth’ (Catechism Of The Catholic Church, paragraphs 495, 966). Similarly, many Protestant theologians, while not using the title ‘Mother of God,’ have acknowledged Mary’s special place in salvation history and her role in bringing Christ into the world.
In his commentary on the psalms, Saint Augustine invites us to reflect on the nature of prayer in the light of the Incarnation. Christ, he says, prays for us, prays in us, and is the one to whom we pray. This threefold pattern expresses the deep mystery of how Christ, as both God and man, draws us into communion with the Father. At the centre of Augustine’s reflection is the conviction that Christ is inseparably united to his Church. Christ is the Head; the Church is his Body. Together, they form one person, what Augustine elsewhere calls the Totus Christus – the whole Christ. This means that the voice of the Church in prayer is the voice of Christ; and the voice of Christ, especially in the Psalms, is the voice of his Body. We speak to God in him, and he speaks to God in us [ … ]
On Tuesday, His Grace turns to the theme of Jesus’ hidden years. His Grace asks the students to consider questions concerning what really happened: ‘Who, for instance, was Joseph? Was he indeed a carpenter, or has Joseph’s true role in the society in which he lived been misconstrued and forgotten to us? Though it be a beautiful, simplifying image to grasp, which offers to us much that is of value in Catholic faith… ‘A wise elder, which carpenter could mean, or a great engineer, an architekton, which in the Greek does not mean carpenter. But carpenter in the Hebrew could mean a wise man…’ His Grace turns the pages of his Bible back and forth, as if to itemize the paucity of information. Then he says: ‘What I think I can say to you with confidence is that it is of profound significance that we simply don’t know what Jesus was doing for most of his earthly life. There are some very different possibilities. One idea cherished by the Church is that Jesus worked with his father Joseph as a carpenter. Another possibility is that Jesus lived and prayed and studied closely with John the Baptist. They were cousins, and very close, almost the same, in age. Luke’s Gospel tells us clearly that Jesus and John knew each other from within the womb before they were born. So there may have been something quite important happening there. You see, we don’t know – it is an impossible mystery to us – just how much Jesus had to learn. This is because, if Jesus knew everything, humanly speaking, even as a tiny baby, then how can we say he is fully human? We simply can’t probe too far into this mystery, but we can draw extraordinary truth and healing from this thought, which becomes of immense relevance in our own lives. Jesus came to know and to understand himself not merely as a son of God, but as God the Son, and so as self-identical with his Father. It is not an adoptive relationship. Jesus is God. Now so much is hidden here. But this is a great gift. If you think about it, how do we come to know that we are loved by God, that we have our relationship with God? What are we born with in here’ – his chest – ‘and what do we have to learn? This is to say, what is gifted to us by other Christians at our baptism? ‘Jesus must have studied, and experienced profound revelation about who and what he truly was, and, so it seems to be, these studies cannot have been confined to the Semitic world. But this is the important point: there is a hiddenness about all of this. No matter which schools and which sects our Lord might have encountered all these years, this to us is as a desert space. What this means is that we can enter into the hidden life of Jesus, and there we can discover our own being with God, our own sonship. Our own particular being loved by God can come to us, if we can enter within this great unknown – into this desert space, where we are loved by Jesus. I firmly believe that there may be a great Lenten mystery in this period of our Lord’s life.’ A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 1 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 2 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 3 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 4 | King James Audio Bible | KJV A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 5 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Holy Week | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 6
- Daily Bible Verses | On Scandal, Sin and Hell | Divine Mercy | Jesus’ Teachings | Casting Out Devils
John tells Jesus that he and other disciples have forbidden a man from casting out devils in Jesus’ name, and Jesus tells him that he was wrong to do this. The man was doing good, irrespective of his not belonging to the community of disciples following Jesus. There is no call for exclusivity, so long as people are working faithfully for and toward the good. Jesus displays an ecumenical attitude here. Different faiths, different churches, can peacefully co-exist and work alongside each other for the greater good [ … ]
