Homily of
Fr. Herbert Nicholls
Today Maronites along with many
other Eastern Catholics and Orthodox honor Mary as Our Lady of the Harvest
which in its pre-Christian origins arose from the needs of the farmers to seek
help from the deities for a fruitful harvest.
Ancient Christian texts began to
attribute to Mary protection not only in material terms of the crops of the
field but also her role in the incarnation of the Son of God, the source of
life, who gives life to the world when we receive His Holy Body and Blood in
the Eucharist.
Many non-Catholics and even
Catholics today ask: Why all the fuss
about Mary? Jesus is the one and only Mediator and Savior. We could go all
the way back to the formative days and councils of the early Church. But it is
sufficient for this reflection to go back about 550 years to the Protestant
Reformation.
A Dutch theologian named Desiderius
Erasmus was born 17 years before Martin Luther. Erasmus became a loyal son of
the Church; at the same time maintaining friendship and dialogue with Luther,
Zwingli, and other reformers exchanging several letters between 1524-1529.
Liberal Protestant movement began to
emphasize Jesus as the teacher of morals and model for social action. They
began to abandon teaching of Jesus as the Incarnate Word. Without the
importance of Mary, the Incarnation becomes unimportant; and when the
Incarnation became unimportant, the uniqueness of Christ was lost.
Without the focus on Mary, the
Church loses focus on Jesus. Without a right focus on Mary and the Incarnation
of her Divine Son, the Church loses its unique position of proclaiming God’s
salvation through the sacrifice of her Son on the Cross. Its as simple as
that—without Mary as His Mother, the entire Christian message falls apart. When
the Catholic Church gathers for worship, fellowship or Bible study, we do not
do so in the name of a social reformer, but in the name of the Divine Son of
God, born of the Virgin Mary, whom He gave to us as His Mother as He hung upon
the Cross.
Erasmus continues to remain
important today, for his warnings against removing the Virgin Mary from her
prominence in the Church’s devotional life. We all need to understand and to
appreciate that Marian festivals of the Catholic and Orthodox churches are one
way in which we celebrate the Christ event.
She is worthy of our homage because
God chose her as the means of presenting us with His greatest gift possible,
His Son. So why all the fuss? Because without it is the stake of losing His
uniqueness, His Incarnation, Atonement and Resurrection; so that He becomes
nothing more than a social reformer, and Christianity becomes just another
faith among the many; but in focusing on Mary, we remain faithful to her Son,
the one and only Mediator and Savior.