The daily Word of God

The Flesh Became Word

In the shadow of the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Church places the commemoration (an obligatory memorial) of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Yes, it truly is necessary to remember and contemplate Mary’s Heart after reflecting on the meaning of Jesus’ Heart. Because if the Word became flesh, and in doing so received a heart of flesh, then Mary is the flesh of the Word—the one from whom the Eternal Word of the Father took His mortal body. As John’s Gospel says, and as we repeat when praying the Angelus, “The Word became flesh.” But that human, mortal flesh in which the Eternal Word took on our nature is concrete, personal, with a face and a name: Mary’s flesh. That is why we can also say that in her, the flesh became Word.

For this reason, we Christians have much to learn from Mary’s Heart. From the gentle and humble Heart of Jesus, we receive the revelation of the wisdom of love. From the Heart of Mary, we learn to receive and internalize that wisdom. Because this learning process is not easy. Not everything is clear from the start. We shouldn’t think we understand everything right away. The wisdom of love reaches the deepest layers of our being, and that requires a process that is not without struggles, uncertainty, and anguish. In our case, that process is even more complicated by inner resistance and closed-mindedness. We are often like that son who said, “Yes, I will go,” but then didn’t (cf. Mt 21:28–32): we profess our faith with orthodoxy, but we don’t always truly believe it—and certainly, we don’t always live it out. To come to true understanding, not just theoretical but from the heart, requires patience and perseverance.

And in this, Mary is a true teacher of the Christian life. In her, there was no resistance; her fiat was complete and unconditional. But even she had to go through that journey of faith in which not everything was clear from the beginning. She too lost sight of Jesus, felt the anguish of a fruitless search (those three days of looking for Him also point to the three days from death to resurrection), and heard words from Jesus that were not immediately clear. But instead of doing what we usually do—trying to “interpret” things based on our own reasoning, trying to tame the Word—Mary “kept all these things in her heart,” allowing the Word, with patience and faith, to mature and take root deep within her soul, in those places where understanding comes only in due time and in fullness.

This is the humble heart, the open heart, the loving heart, the mother’s heart—the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And if we are called to imitate Jesus, the One who is “gentle and humble of heart,” shouldn’t we also imitate the one from whom that Heart took its flesh?