Daily Reflection on the Gospel of Friday, September 8, 2023

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Today, Jesus' genealogy, the Savior that had to come and be born of Mary, shows us how the work of God is interwoven into human history, and how God acts in the secret and silence of every single day. At the same time, we can see his reliability to accomplish his promises. Even Ruth and Rahab (cf. Mt 1:5), foreigners, converted to the faith of the only God, were our Savior's ancestors.

The Holy Spirit, that mysteriously had to incarnate the Son in Mary, entered, therefore, into our history a long time before, and traced a path leading to the Virgin Mary of Nazareth and, through her, to her Son Jesus. “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel” (Mt 1:23). How spiritually delicate Mary's entrails, her heart and her will, must have been, to engage the attention of the Father and make her become the mother of “God-with-mankind”; He, who had to bring the supernatural light and grace for the redemption of all of us. In this work, everything brings us to contemplate, admire and worship, through prayer, the greatness, the generosity and the simplicity of the divine action that will extol and rescue our human lineage through our Lord’s personal involvement.

Further away, in Today's Gospel, we see how Mary was advised she would conceive God, the Savior of his People. And let us realize that this girl, virgin and Jesus' mother, had to be also our mother. The special election of Mary, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Lk 1:42), makes us admire God's tenderness in his way of proceeding; because He did not redeem us —so to speak— “by remote control”, but by closely binding himself with our family and our history. Who could ever imagine God to be so great and so acquiescent as to so intimately bind Himself to us?