The Presentation of Blessed Virgin Mary – Readings

Commentary on Zechariah 2:14-17; Matthew 12:46-50

The Gospel reading is from Matthew. It is a short, isolated passage between a number of separate incidents taking place between the discourse on the mission of the disciples (chap 10) and the discourse on the parables of the Kingdom (chap 13). It concerns the family of Jesus.

There are slight differences between Mark’s account of this event and Matthew’s. As usually is the case, Matthew’s treatment is softer and more gentle, but Mark’s may be closer to the original.

Matthew says that, while Jesus was speaking to the crowds, he was told that his mother and his ‘brothers’ were outside, looking for him. ‘Brothers’ is normally understood here in a wider sense to include cousins. (In some Asian countries, for instance, it is quite common for people to talk about their ‘cousin brothers’ or ‘cousin sisters’.)

Jesus was told:

…your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.

Jesus’ reply seems rather abrupt and unexpected, if not downright impolite, especially coming from him:

Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?

Then, stretching out his hand towards his disciples, he says:

Here are my mother and my brothers!

And he then defines what constitutes being a member of his family:

For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.

Jesus, of course, is not being rude to his mother or the rest of his family. But he is making what he regards as a very important point, and it is put in other ways in other parts of the gospel. To be a follower of Jesus is to belong to a new family, a family with stronger ties than flesh and blood. It is a family which is bound in love and obedience to God as Father, to Jesus as Brother and committed to living according to the Way of Life they propose.

Part of that Way, of course, is unconditional love of every single person, including even enemies. Surely then, the members of one’s own family would be included. But, if ever there was a conflict between what God wants and what a family member wants, then there is only one choice available.

Just prior to Mark’s account of this story (3:31-35), he tells us that Jesus “went home”. This unspecified ‘home’, mentioned a number of times, is a symbol of the place where Christ’s disciples gather together. It is significant that in today’s passage we are told that Jesus’ family members were ‘outside’, indicating they were outside in more ways than one. Jesus, with his disciples, is on the ‘inside’.

And where does Mary come into all of this? Was she an outsider? Hardly. She is the same person who made an unqualified commitment to God’s will at Nazareth never once withdrew it. And she was one of the very few who was with her Son to his last dying breath—with him in every way. I need to ask myself if I am truly a member of Jesus’ family.

The First Reading is a short passage from the prophet Zechariah. The passage is a song of praise for Israel, called here “daughter Zion”. But the words can very easily be applied to Mary, especially where Yahweh says:

Sing and rejoice, O daughter Zion! For I will come and dwell in your midst, says the Lord.

Today’s feast, even if it may lack historical veracity, is full of meaning. It suggests that from her youngest days, Mary was being prepared for her unique role as the Mother of the Son of God, an extraordinary privilege shared by no other. At the same time, the real greatness of Mary is suggested in the gospel where true greatness does not come from birth but from the total giving of oneself to doing what God wants. In this Mary had no peer.

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The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a feast celebrated by both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches. It is the celebration of a presumed event of which there is no strict historical record—namely, that Mary, as a child, was presented to God by her parents. There is no mention of this event anywhere in the New Testament.

However, it does appear in an apocryphal work called the Infancy Narrative of James. According to this story, Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anne, who had been without children, received a heavenly message that they would bear a child. When a girl was born, the parents went in thanksgiving to the Temple in Jerusalem to consecrate her to God. The story then says that Mary remained in the Temple until she reached puberty and then she was entrusted to Joseph who was to be her guardian.

Other versions of the story from works such as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Gospel of the Nativity of Mary say that Mary was brought to the Temple about the age of 3 in fulfilment of a vow by her parents. And she was to remain there to be prepared for her future role as the Mother of God.

The celebration of the feast began with the dedication of the Basilica of Saint Mary the New, which was constructed in 543 near where the Temple had been in Jerusalem. This basilica was later destroyed, but the feast had now spread all through the Eastern church. In the West, it was first adopted in 1373 by the papal chapel in Avignon (the city in the south of France where the papacy spent several years in exile). However, it was removed as a Church feast by Pope Pius V from the revised Roman Calendar in 1568. But it was then again restored as a feast in 1585 by Pope Sixtus VI.

Western art usually focuses on the figure of the little girl Mary climbing the steps of the Temple, having left her parents at the bottom, and approaching the Chief Priest and other Temple figures at the top of the steps. The Presentation was one of the traditional scenes illustrating The Life of the Virgin.

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