Reflection - Divine Flesh

By Steve Hall

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https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/010121.cfm
Numbers 6:22-27
Luke 2:16-21

Every once in a while, I cheat. As I have noted before, these reflections have been planned to accompany the readings from the up-coming Saturday. This week is different. It is different because the feast we celebrate on New Year’s day is worthy of special attention. Nothing against St. Basil the Great or St. Gregory Nazianzen, both notable and worthy bishops and Doctors of the Church. Rather, I ran across something that demands to be shared on this feast day of Mary, Mother of God.

When I was young, New Year’s day was an anomalous Holy Day of obligation, though it did seem appropriate that the new year should begin with prayer. As my understanding grew so did my awareness that the celebration had something to do with Jewish ritual and its timing was related to the eighth day following a male child’s birth, when he was circumcised and given his official name as a member of the Chosen People. The fact that it fell on the first day of the new year was circumstantial; rather, the date of the feast was determined by the day specified by the church for the celebration of the Savior’s birth. That is what determined the date for the circumcision. During my lifetime, however, the Church seems to have clarified the purpose of the feast. It is now designated as the feast of Mary, Mother of God.

The early Church had difficulty in grasping the notion that God should experience with mankind a kinship of shared flesh. The consequences of such a conceit being true challenged a foundational truth of Judaism: God is totally other. One necessary consequence of such a postulate was that God, the very creator of the universe, actually suffered and died. How was this possible? The kinship of God and man was argued in the context of Jesus. Was he God? Was he man? Was he God pretending to be man? Was he a man infused with divinity? The proposed alternatives to the ultimately accepted truth were numerous. In the final analysis it came to be debated in the context of Mary: Was she or was she not the Mother of God? The positive answer to this question is the basis of the feast being celebrated.

The following information I happened upon while perusing he internet. The source was ambiguous, but I think it was from a magazine article. In any case, it was this excerpt that called me to shift my reflection to the feast celebrated New Year’s Day.

Jean Paul Sartre was a Frenchman by birth. He lived in the first part of the twentieth century. He was a playwright. He was a philosopher. Ultimately he would be known as an educated and intelligent atheist. He was captured by the Germans in the early days of World War II and was subsequently imprisoned where there were a large number of detained clergy. To pass the time and to ‘entertain’ his fellow prisoners, he wrote a play.

“The most remarkable moment in the play is when Sartre tries to enter into Mary’s state of mind. He provides an astonishingly warm portrayal of her relationship with Jesus: ‘And no other woman has had God just for herself in that way. A very tiny God whom she can take in her arms and cover with kisses, a warm-bodied God who smiles and breathes, a God she can touch, a God who is alive. And if I were a painter, it is at a moment like this that I would paint Mary. I would try to capture the air of affectionate daring and delicate shyness with which she puts out her finger to touch the soft little skin of this baby God whose warm weight she feels on her lap and who smiles at her.’

This is not the same nihilistic Sartre who published the novel Nausea in 1938, just two years beforehand. It is a different Sartre, a man touched by the wonder of being, by the hope of new birth, and by the genuine affection of Mary: “She looks at him and thinks: ‘This God is my child, this divine flesh is my flesh. He is made of me, he has my eyes and the shape of his mouth is the shape of mine . . . He is my God and he looks like me!’”

That is worthy of reflection more so than any words I might offer.