Listening and acting on the word of God

A Reflection for Saturday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

She’s a woman who stands out in a crowd—which in first-century Palestine, may have been unusual or even carried with it some risk. We at least know her words were memorable enough to be recorded in today’s Gospel from Luke.

“Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed,” the woman cries out to Jesus. In the passages just before this encounter, we see others in the crowd being far less complimentary to him. After Jesus drives out a demon, some in the crowd accuse him of driving it out “[b]y the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons,” and “[o]thers, to test him, asked him for a sign from heaven.” Jesus responds with a fiery sermon about divided kingdoms and unclean spirits.

Amid this brewing hostility, the woman’s benediction seems bold, even brave. Because while her words are seemingly about Mary, they are meant for the target of the crowd’s ire: Jesus. As the theologian Gerhard Lohfink puts it in Jesus of Nazareth, “In the East one praises someone by praising his or her mother and abuses someone by slandering her or his mother.” (The same is true today; see the whole genre of “yo mama” jokes.)

So when Jesus responds to the woman, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it,” he is not denying the blessedness of his own mother. As he well knows, Mary was the very first person to hear word of the coming Messiah and to observe God’s will by bringing Christ into the world. Jesus is not correcting the woman but returning the compliment. He recognizes her belief and her courage in acting upon it by breaking with the crowd.

And Jesus was not simply praising one woman’s belief; he is inviting all of us to share in his blessedness by listening to and acting on the word of God. And today, as then, that often means standing out in a crowd. This is especially true when it comes to “observing” God’s word in the public arena. It is often said Catholics are “politically homeless” in the United States. That doesn’t mean we should eschew politics altogether; it does mean believers shouldn’t blend in perfectly with any faction or party. And like the woman in the crowd, we who have heard the word should speak boldly in defense of Jesus, whom we encounter in the poor, the vulnerable and the strangers in our midst.