I noticed something different when praying about this Gospel a few weeks ago. Did you hear what actually happened in it?
The story starts right after the angels have appeared to the Shepherds, and so, Saint Luke tells us, they “went in haste to Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger.”
So, step one: the shepherds arrive at the manger. Then he tells us, once they had seen the child for themselves, they ran away as fast as they had arrive…telling everyone that they had seen the child, which the angels had told them was the Messiah.
You can picture the shepherds, running around the town, banging on doors and awaking everyone up, telling them that the Messiah was in a manger. “All who heard it were amazed ,” Saint Luke tells us.
So, the shepherds are really the first evangelists, spreading the good news the the Lord has come to his people to set them free.
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Almost by contrast, Mary remains in the manger, and does two things. First, she “keeps all these things in her heard” and second, so “reflects on them.”
First, what are “these things.” And here is what just occurred to me. When the shepherds arrived at the manger, I am sure they told Mary and Joseph what the angels told them. How their first words were the same as Gabriel spoke to the Virgin at her annunciation: Don’t be afraid! It’s kind of a natural thing for angels to say when people see the bright lights and the glory for eh Lord surrounding them.
But then they would have repeated the new that the angels brought “good news of great joy….for all the people,” that
“today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Messiah and Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”
So Mary is silently thinking about how she fits into these incredible events, and what it all means.
The original Greek word for what Mary was doing is sumbállousa, which literally means to try to put something together, like a puzzle. She had been given one piece of the puzzle by Gabriel, who told her that she would conceive a child in her womb by the holy spirit and she would name him Jesus, the Son of the Most High, who will rule over David’s house forever. And that he would be called holy, the Son of God.” And now the shepherds give her several other peeves to the puzzle: the baby she holds in her arms in the Messiah.
As our beloved Pope emeritus described it:
Although the Child lying in a manger looks like all the children of the world, at the same time he is totally different: he is the Son of God, he is God, true God and true man. This mystery - the Incarnation of the Word and the divine Motherhood of Mary - is great and certainly far from easy to understand with the human mind alone.
Like Mary, we ponder these things in our hearts. With our eyes we see a weak little baby, but with our hearts we embrace the Son of God, the one through whom the universe was made and who has come to set us free from sin and teach us how to love.
