HAIL, HOLY QUEEN!

A SERMON FOR THE 3RD SUNDAY AFTER EASTER

Those of you with functioning memories will remember that we’re in the process of learning the three things necessary for us to save our souls.  Last week, we spoke about the necessity of belonging to the true Church, the Church Christ founded, the only one that teaches in the Spirit of Truth.  

Today, you might expect we would be moving on to the second requirement.  Once we’re members of the Church, what must we do next?  In brief, we must obey the commandments of God and the Church.  The opening of today’s Epistle would have led into this second requirement for salvation very nicely: “Dearly beloved: I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts…”. 

But today is Mothers’ Day.  And on this day, we crown our heavenly Mother as Queen of the Angels, and Queen of All Saints.  We may be tempted to think of this as a distraction from our series of sermons identifying the three keys to salvation.  But let me tell you this:  the Blessed Virgin Mary is never a distraction.  

When the Protestant Revolution tore Christ’s Church apart in the 15- and 1600s, one of the ideas of the new religion was that the Church had become too complex in its structure and its worship.  They wanted to simplify things so that the people would understand their faith better, without being distracted by theological concepts that were difficult to understand, ideas like Transubstantiation, Purgatory, and devotion to the saints.  So they threw it all out and left themselves with nothing but the Bible as their guide.  They then misinterpreted the Bible to suit their simplification strategy, ignoring whatever was in it that supported the traditional position of the Catholic Church and differed from their own.  For example, they criticize us for calling Mary “our blessed Lady” or the “blessed Virgin Mary” even though it’s right there in the Bible, (Luke 1:48) where she prophesied in her Magnificatthat henceforth “all generations shall call me blessed”.  

No.  Our Lady is not a distraction from God.  She is the means that God chose to use for our Redemption. She is the means without which that Redemption would never have taken place.  She was chosen from before all time, or ever the earth was, to be the Mother of the Saviour, the Mother of the Son of God, the Mother ofGod.  No greater privilege than this was ever granted to any other woman.  Nor to any man for that matter, nor to any Angel even. This mere mortal woman was given the privilege of being conceived without inheriting the stain of original sin passed down to all the other offspring of Adam and Eve.  She was given the privilege of not seeing bodily corruption at the end of her life, but being raised body and soul into her Son’s kingdom.  And once in her rightful place in heaven next to her Son, she was given the privilege of being crowned by him as Queen of heaven and earth.

The title of “Queen” implies royal power.  Our Lady has been given authority over us.  And why? What was the reason she was endowed with such authority over men and angels?  Because this was the same Blessed Virgin who had been given the parentalauthority of “mother” over God himself in his human form.  This power over the Son of God was bestowed from the moment he allowed himself to be imprisoned in her womb at the Incarnation.  For as we are all too aware these days, women have the power over their unborn to either protect and care for them, or to neglect, and even destroy them!  Then, after his Nativity, like any child, he was dependent on her, and obeyed her wishes.  Holy Scripture even tells us that, after being lost and found in the Temple of Jerusalem, he returned to Nazareth with her and St. Joseph, and was “subject to them.”   Even as a grown man, at the wedding feast of Cana our Lord obeyed his Mother’s wishes and turned water into wine.  If Christ himself honored and obeyed her like this, who are we to regard her as a mere distraction, or to relegate her to the role of just one of the characters in the Christmas pageant?

At the end of our Lord’s life, he looked down from the Cross and told St. John “Behold, thy Mother.”  She went from being Mother of his dying physical body to being the Mother of his everlasting Mystical Body, which is the Church.  Then at the end of her own life, our Lord beheld again his Mother, now  assumed into heaven, and he confirmed her with the authority that goes with motherhood, giving her the title of Queen.

When we crown her image today, we are not, as the Protestants imagine, worshiping a statue. That’s the kind of fake news we see so much of in today’s politics.  If I deliberately misinterpret your intentions, it’s just a way of promoting my agenda at the expense of yours.  But it’s based on a lie, a lie about your internal motivations, and you are the collateral damage in my wish to promote my own ideas.  In this case, it is we Catholics who are the collateral damage resulting from the false accusation of idol worship.  We don’t worship idols.  To be fair, we don’t even worship our Lady.  Worship in its truest form is reserved for God alone.  Our true motive today is simply to acknowledge the authority our blessed Lady has over us, and to subject ourselves to it.  And why not?  Why shouldn’t we bow to her wishes?  What are those wishes anyway?  Will she lead us astray, does anyone really think?  What is the one command she gives in Scripture?  It’s when she orders the stewards at Cana “Whatsoever he saith, do it!” In other words, obey God.  She does not wield power like some arrogant despot, she wields it with absolute humility, her only command being to obey not her, but her Son.

And that is why today’s Coronation of Our Lady is no distraction from our three keys to salvation. For the second key is precisely to follow this command of our Lady, “whatsoever he saith, do it.”  In other words obey the commandments of God.  We’ll be going into this in a bit more detail shortly, but today, let’s just bear in mind what our Lord said to that certain woman in the crowd who cried out “Blessed is the womb that bare thee.”  “Yea, rather, blessed,” he replied, “are they that hear the Word of God and keep it.”  For us, that means that God will bless us if we keep his Word—his commandments.  For our blessed Lady, the repercussions of hearing and keeping the Word of God were so much more—blessed is she that heard the Word of God, and because she heard it and agreed to it, that Word of God became the Word made Flesh, and dwelt amongst us. No one ever heard and kept the commandments of God with such a profound and far-reaching result as this Blessed Virgin of Nazareth, who first heard them when she was conceived without original sin, and went on to live and die without the stain of sin.

A distraction from God?  Hardly. As members of Christ’s Mystical Body the Church, we share with Christ his Mother—the Mother of his Mystical Body the Church, the blessed and immaculate Virgin-Mother.  Like any Mother, she guides us.  As the perfect Mother, she is the perfect guide, the Star of the Sea lighting our way to the Church first of all, and then, with that same bright light of her good example, taking us on our second step, obedience to God and his commandments, and the in-dwelling of God in our hearts through grace.  As the Holy Ghost overshadowed her and the Word made Flesh was contained physically in her womb, so too shall the same Holy Ghost dwell in our souls as his temple.  And he will remain there for as long as we are free from serious sin and in the state of grace.  Today we pray to our beloved Mother, our Queen of Heaven, to preserve us in that grace, to protect us from the dangers of temptation, keep us free from sin, and help us when we fall.  Hail ,Mary! Hail, Queen of Heaven!  Ora pro nobis!