Monday, November 21 : Saint Bede the Venerable

“Happy the one who bore you and she who nursed you at the breast.” How great is the devotion, how great the faith are expressed in the words of this woman in the gospel. Whereas scribes and Pharisees put the Lord to the test and blaspheme against him, this woman acknowledges his incarnation before them all with such loyalty and confesses it with such assurance that she undoes the calumny of her contemporaries and the false faith of heretics to come. Offending against the works of the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ contemporaries deny he is really the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father. Later on people also denied that Mary ever-Virgin had, through the working of the Holy Spirit, provided the substance of her flesh to the Son of God, who would be born with a truly human body. They denied he was really Son of man with the same nature as his mother. But the apostle Paul condemns this opinion when he says of Jesus that he was “born of a virgin, subject to the Law” (Gal 4,4). For, conceived in the womb of the Virgin, he took his flesh, not out of nothing, nor from some other source, but from the body of his mother. Otherwise it would not be correct to call him truly Son of man… O truly happy mother who, in the words of the poet: “has given birth to the King who, through all ages, rules heaven and earth. She has the joy of motherhood and the honor of virginity. Before was there none like her and none will be seen after her” (Sedulius). Nevertheless the Lord adds: “Happy, rather, are those who hear the Word of God and keep it”. The Savior gives magnificent confirmation to this woman’s testimony. Not only does he declare blessed she to whom it was granted to give birth to the Word of God bodily, but blessed, too, all those who give themselves to spiritually conceiving the same Word through the hearing of faith and to giving birth and feeding him either in their own hearts or in that of others, keeping him present by doing good.
maronite readings – rosary,team