A Homily for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Readings: Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab  Luke 1:26-38

It is easy to imagine that on that first cold night of Christmas, the Virgin Mary responded to her child’s crying by holding him close to her heart and asking, “Am I not here with you, your mother?” 

She could have said the same in the previous nine months as she carried him in her womb, but now that her child had been born into a dark and cold world, it was all the more important to assure him that she was still there with him. “Am I not here with you, your mother?” 

How many times, as he grew into adulthood at her side, did she say the same? We do not know what, if anything, she said to him in his passion, but it must have been something very much like, “Am I not here with you, your mother?” 

We call being baptized into Christ a “christening” because in those waters each of us is given a new identity. We are baptized into the person and the mission of Christ. The task of each new Christian is to reproduce Christ in his or her own life. 

We carry this new identity, as both blessing and charge, throughout our lives, and it does not end in death. Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines heaven by saying, “To live in heaven is ‘to be with Christ.’ The elect live ‘in Christ,’ but they retain, or rather find, their true identity, their own name” (No. 1025). Whatever name, whatever identity the saints have forged on earth becomes a part of Christ’s own in heaven. 

Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, his first disciple, carried her own fully Christic identity into heaven. What she was on earth, she is even more so in eternity. So it should come as no surprise that she should appear to Juan Diego, an Indigenous native of the Americas, and say to him and through him to the peoples of the Americas, “¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre?” 

And so she remains, this woman “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars,” this woman who appears on Juan Diego’s cloak still bearing her child within her flesh (Rev 12:1). 

Jesus did not become Christ only for a while, only to return to some state beyond the world. No, he forever remains our Christ, our savior. Nor do his saints shed their identities. In their love and concern for us, the saints in heaven continue the charge they accepted in their own baptisms, to seek out the lost and to carry them to Christ. 

Thus, the Virgin of Guadalupe remains our mother. The woman who comforts us as she once consoled her son. “¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre?”

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“Retablo Final,” by Francisco Díaz de León, 1928, Wikipedia.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.