Antonio Lurgio
Maria, the suburban girl who with her yes breaks down the fence of no’s built around the woman of the time.
Mary, the girl from Nazareth, a suburban village but also infamous!!! In fact, tradition dictated that nothing good came from Nazareth.
Mary, the woman of faith The Gospels contain few lines about Mary, but what emerges as a significant fact, as her excellent virtue, is faith. Elizabeth says to Mary, “Blessed are you because you have believed the word of the Lord” (Lk. 1:45). It was not easy for Mary to believe. But at the same time she was not overwhelmed by the religious-dogmatic formulary of the schools of the time and was able to retain the freedom to observe differently.
Mary the woman who “kept all these things pondering them in her heart” (Lk. 2:19). That is, she does not harbor traditional theological certainties, but opens herself to the God of newness and appearance, to the incomprehensible.
“They therefore went without delay and found Mary and Joseph and the child, who was lying in the manger. And having seen it, they reported what had been told them about the child. Everyone who heard was amazed at the things the shepherds were saying.” Lk. 2:16-18
Mary the girl who is open to an unpredictable God because she is not enclosed in patterns and interpretive cages, abandons the old, the tradition of the fathers and opens herself to the newness of God. Mary is called to choose, always, between the will of God handed down by that whole institutionalized religious world into which she was born or living in the following of that newness of God’s face that hovers through the breath of her son.
Mary the woman of the YES! Here then is Mary’s great yes: to go from being a mother to being a disciple as Dante beautifully depicts her “Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son.”
On this path. no privileges for Mary, nothing that can make us feel her distant, unapproachable, inimitable. There is nothing in her that we cannot relive in ourselves as well. Mary is a concrete sign of what God can accomplish with every creature who places no obstacles in the way of the power of his love.
What can this woman from two thousand years ago say to us today?
- Take the risk and responsibility for the unpredictable, do not suffer the predefined, do not settle for the small and quiet space of everyday life, but widen your gaze to the future.
- Not accept the “it has always been done in this way”, otherwise Gabriel and Mary would never have met, but to risk the certainty that the God of my life is not behind but ahead of me so it is not to be preserved/deposited in formulas or anything else, but welcomed with its irresistible newness.
- Walk, against all odds, that message of the kingdom that smells of life.
If Mary had calculated the risk of her yes, she would not have moved from Nazareth; she might have preferred to continue in the rut her people had always frequented. Instead, she had the courage to take a new path, to experience a God whose word had often been used for other purposes.
It is this the path of freedom/exodus of Mary!
