CHRIST, MARY AND THE CHURCH: MYSTERY INTERWEAVING

In the book of the prophet Isaiah we read: “The word that came out of my mouth will not return to me without effect” (55,10-11).

At that time these words seemed far from obvious. Indeed, they resounded in history as a contradiction, given the continuous failures that the calls of God to his people suffered.

Indeed the sowing of God in the world seemed sterile but said in a prophetic language, that word meant to be an encouragement to those who in spite of everything continued to believe in the power of God.

In the prophet’s linguistic metaphor, in which the “earth” was a symbol of the human heart, these words sounded like a promise, finding complete fulfillment in Jesus: the Word of God that truly penetrated the human earth, becoming in it a seed that bears fruit and the fruitful response that rooted it in the world in a living and definitive way.

Even today this word appears to us as a contradiction, in the face of history which attests that the word of Jesus does not dwell in the hearts of men, who live in its full forgetfulness.

Yet in the time of Jesus there was a “human land” in which the Word of God penetrated deeply, increasingly being rooted in it, transforming it into a fertile and fruitful land. That “land” is the Virgin Mary. In her heart the seed of the Word has penetrated bearing fruit.

What happened in the holy soil of Mary, God wants it to happen in the land that is every baptized person. The seed of the Word did not remain alone in Mary, but that earth by welcoming it became her servant, allowing the Word to become man, fruit of the earth, so that it returned to God mixed with the earth of the entire humanity.

How can a man, imitating the mystery of Mary, become a fertile field for the Word of God? He can do it on condition that he lets himself be penetrated by the seed of the Word of God into the land of his heart, preparing the ground that he is tilling it with prayer and presenting God his own history of sin, fragility and weakness. Then, being earth of the Word means being a land that lets itself be absorbed by the seed, so that, giving up on itself, the seed sprouts in abundance. It is necessary to do like Mary, who, in her motherhood, let all the substance of herself be transfused in the seed of the Word, generating a new life. We believers too must let ourselves be consumed in order to be transformed into the seed of the Word which needs us to become the fruit of the earth.

This admirable and mysterious intertwining between seed and earth, fully realized in Mary and Jesus, can help us reflect on the agitated activism of our spiritual life, which hides that we have separated Christ from the Mother. A fact that also reverberates on our way of thinking and perceiving the Church, that is not a finished product delivered to us, but that seed of God that we must help to develop until maturation, but not with our doing, but living the Marian mystery, since she herself is like the mysterious Christological and Marian intertwining. In fact, the Church called to be a fertile land of the word, she will become it on condition that she submits to this sign. Each baptized person must accept within himself the symbol of the fertile soil, becoming men and women of waiting, who, gathered in the interior of the heart, in listening to the Word, in the depth of prayer, in the yearning for faith and in charity and hope, make room for the growth of God in them.

Father Massimo Cardamone