One of Us

Gospel: Luke 1: 39-47

Over the centuries we have made both Jesus and Mary so inaccessible to the ordinary person with the vast layers of theology we have overlaid upon them.  The one who was a carpenter and rabbi who went around healing and liberating people is now a king, prince, emperor figure so far removed from human experience we cannot comprehend him.  And Mary who was by her own admission a lowly handmaid in a poor town is queen, empress, immaculate so distant and aloof from the people from whence she came.

But in today's Gospel and feast we have a woman whose instinct is to go to her people and to be among them.  She goes to her cousin Elizabeth to be of help to her as she prepares to give birth to her child.  In this feast we find Mary coming among her poor ones in a land now dominated by foreign oppression in order to comfort the poor and suffering.  Mary comes to visit a poor boy, not the conquistadors, not the bishop who lives in comfort.  

Jesus did not come to live in palaces and dominate over people.  He came born in a stable on the margins of society.  He grew up in a poor insignificant town, and he went about from town to town being among the poor, the sick, the marginalized providing them with the healing they needed for their infirmities, the liberation they needed from the demons that oppressed them, the food they needed to nourish them in body and spirit.  That is the One we await, the One who lives among us now.