Gospel Commentary – September 8, 2025

Today we celebrate the memorial of the birth of the Mother of Jesus. In Spain, where I am writing these lines, it is still summertime, so I hope you will allow me a comment that may at first seem a little frivolous to readers.

This feast has reminded me of a movie, and of one scene in particular. It is the third film in the Indiana Jones series, The Last Crusade. In it, the hero must search for the Holy Grail amid great dangers. The Holy Grail is understood to be the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Toward the end of the film, after many trials, Indiana arrives at a cave chamber where a table holds many cups. He must choose, among them, the true cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. There are cups of every kind: gold, silver, adorned with precious stones, beautifully engraved metal, glass. Indiana hesitates until he reflects that Jesus of Nazareth was a poor man, and at that supper He would not have had access to luxurious objects. What suited Him was the poorest of cups. So Indiana chooses a clay cup, the one most of us might have ignored. He takes the simple cup and says, “This is the cup of a carpenter.”

I know it is only a movie. But it seems to me that the screenwriter understood something fundamental about the Gospel: that God became flesh among the poor, that He made Himself poor, and lived among the poor, the marginalized, those who had nothing.

Mary belongs to this same world of Jesus. Who else could be the mother of Jesus but a simple, poor woman from Galilee—that borderland, marginalized and despised by the so-called “true” Jews, those who considered themselves the bearers of God’s promise? Mary was God’s entryway into our world. And God did not choose wealth, prestige, or status. He chose the door of simplicity, of poverty. God chose what is small in order to be everything for everyone. That is who Mary is, no matter how much some may want to surround her with pomp and grandeur.