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They saw the child with Mary

(Mt 2:11)

            Happy New Year and welcome back! As in previous years, only a few members of our community remained in Jakarta during the holidays; but, slowly, our brothers and sisters have started coming back refreshed and ready to take on the task of evangelization in Indonesia.

            Although there were very few of us, we managed to accomplish, with God’s grace, all the tasks assigned by the parish. As you are aware, every year we are requested to: set up and decorate the altar to be used for the Christmas Masses; prepare the charcoal needed for the incense to be used during these Masses; and take care of the priest’s vestments, servers’ clothes, unconsecrated hosts, ciboria and other items needed for the Mass. In addition, this year we were asked to provide the choir to sing during the Children’s Mass – the most attended of all the three Christmas Masses.

            Bonnie and Linda coordinated the Children’s Mass; Jun and Jean the Midnight Mass; and Bert and Ditas the Christmas morning Mass. With heroic effort and determination, Jojo and Joy, with the assistance of Bert and Ditas, formed a choir from the few YFC and CFC members available. And since these were all God’s work, everything went well.

     My brothers and sisters, I should like to share with you that Jean and I (and I am sure the other members, too) felt a special joy while serving during the Christmas Masses (we attended all three Masses). Not only that, during the Christmas and New Year holidays, the Holy Spirit led me to reflect on Matthew 2:11: On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. The words “they saw the child with Mary” kept on coming back into my mind during the holidays. And as I reflected on these words and on the events in December, I found the Lord’s message to our community.

            You may recall that on December 12, the feast of our Lady of Guadalupe, Jean and I invited all the CFC leaders to our house for dinner and to say the rosary and novena to our Lady of Guadalupe. To prepare for my short exhortation prior to the novena, I read A Woman Clothed with the Sun, a book on the eight great apparitions of our Lady edited by John J. Delaney, and reviewed Guadalupe: What Her Eyes Say by Francis Anson and The Wonder of Guadalupe by Francis Johnston.

            When our son, Joubert, arrived from Manila on December 20 to spend the Christmas holidays with us, he brought a gift from Jun and Angie – a book by Joselito Yap on Mary’s prophecies entitled In Our Days. After reading this book, I read Veritatis Splendor, an encyclical letter of Pope John Paul II. And lo and behold! Pope John Paul II ended this encyclical with a prayer to Mary, Mother of God and Mother of Mercy.

            During the past month therefore, I found myself reading books about the Blessed Mother (as I said even Veritatis Splendor ends with the Pope’s prayer to Mary) and reflecting on the word “they saw the child with Mary.” In these six words from the gospel of Matthew, three characters are mentioned: the men from the east (“they”), Jesus (“child”), and Mary. In this verse, Joseph is not mentioned and Jesus is not named – only Mary has been identified.

            As I reflect on these words, I begin to better understand the role God has given to the Blessed Virgin in our salvation. We are the “they” in this verse. With God’s help, we are able to go on a journey towards our salvation and with God’s grace we are able to see the “star” that guides us to Jesus. And as we kneel down to worship Jesus, our Savior, we see Mary beside Him.

            Mary was with Jesus in Bethlehem. She was with Him in Egypt, in Nazareth, and in Jerusalem. She was at the foot of the cross in Calvary. She was there when our Savior was born. She was there when He died. And Mary was there when Jesus appeared to the disciples after rising from the dead.

            Pope John Paul II has declared 1997 as the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1998, the Year of the Holy Spirit; 1999, the Year of the Father; and 2000, the Year of the Trinity). Bearing in mind that our work of evangelization is in obedience to Jesus’ command, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19), we should, during this year, double our efforts to “make disciples of all nations.” Jesus also said, “I am with you always.” When Jesus is with us, there will also be Mary.

            My brothers and sisters, the message to our community is this. Through these words, “they saw the child with Mary,” we are reminded that Mary, the Mother of God, our Lady of Guadalupe, is always close to Jesus, our Lord, and that we can always come to her for help in our work of evangelization.

            We are reminded to recall what happened in the Americas a few hundred years ago. When the Spanish forces arrived in Mexico in 1519, the country had some ten million inhabitants composed of various tribes that had been incorporated into the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs were pagans who offered human sacrifices to their gods. For instance, at the inauguration of the temple to their god of the sun, some 20,000 were sacrificed.

            Conversion to Christianity was difficult and slow in spite of the heroic efforts of the Spanish missionaries – until that morning of December 9, 1531 when the Blessed Mother appeared to a poor Indian peasant named Juan Diego. She appeared to him four times, the last time on the morning of Tuesday, December 12, when she gave the sign the unbelieving Bishop Zumarraga was asking for. Juan Diego brought the fresh roses to the bishop wrapped in his tilma (a kind of cape, also called ayate). The bishop gazed at them, momentarily speechless. It was the sign he had asked of the Blessed Virgin to show that she had heard his prayer for peace in the country. Full of wonder, he lifted up his eyes to the tilma and at that instant there appeared on it a glorious image of the Mother of Christ.

            The rest is history. A chapel was built on the hill of Tepeyac as requested by the Virgin of Guadalupe. Until 1531, conversions to Christianity came in trickles. But after the apparitions, “the trickle of conversions soon become a river, and that river a flood which is perhaps unprecedented in the history of Christianity” (Johnston). Within a few years, 9 million Aztecs were converted to Christianity. “Several trustworthy contemporary writers, including a certain Father Alegre, aver that one missionary, a Flemish Franciscan named Peter of Ghent, baptized with his own hands over one million Mexicans. ‘Who will not recognize the Spirit of God in moving so many millions to enter the kingdom of Christ,’ wrote Fr. Anticoli, S.J. ‘And when we consider that there occurred no portent or other supernatural event … to attract such multitudes, other than the apparitions of the Virgin, we may state with assurance that it was the Vision of the Queen of the Apostles that called the Indians to the Faith’ “ (Johnston).

            There is a message for us here. In our work of evangelization, should we not appeal to our Lady of Guadalupe for help? Since she is the Queen of the Apostles, is she not our best ally in this work? Evangelization is spreading the word of God so that those who hear may keep it. It is therefore no coincidence that Pope Paul II in Veritatis Splendor would write, “By accepting and pondering in her heart events which she did not always understand, she became the model of all those who hear the word of God and keep it.”

            Jesus commanded us to make disciples of all nations. A disciple is one who hears the word of God and does it. When Mary said, “Be it done to me according to your word,” she became the first Christian disciple because she was the first one to hear the word of God and to consent wholeheartedly that it be done.

            Pope Paul VI in Marialis Cultus (1974) wrote: The Virgin Mary has always been proposed to the faithful by the church as an example to be imitated, not precisely in the type of life she led and much less for the sociocultural background in which she lived and which scarcely today exists anywhere. Rather she is held up as an example to the faithful for the way in which in her own particular life she fully and responsibly accepted the will of God, because she heard the word of God and acted on it, and because charity and the spirit of service were the driving force of her actions. She is worthy of imitation because she was the first and most perfect of Christ’s disciples.

            Mary, the Virgin of Guadalupe, requested that a temple be built on the hill of Tepeyac, the same hill where years before there was a pagan temple of Tonantzin, the Aztecs’ mother god. After the temple was built, conversions came in droves.

            The message to us this New Year is this: Let us build temples of Mary in our hearts! In our evangelization, let us ask the help of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And then we can become more effective instruments for transmitting God’s word to others.

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