Our Lady

But above all we honour Our Lady because God himself has honoured her above any other human being by choosing her to be the Mother of his Son.  And as she is his Mother, Jesus too honours her above all others.  You will remember that on the Cross she was his last earthly care.

Jesus had no human father.  Joseph, his guardian and the husband of Our Lady, was now dead and she had no other children of her own, otherwise she would have made her home with them and not, as actually happened, with St John.  Those whom the Gospel calls Our Lord’s ‘brothers’ were probably his cousins.  The Jews used the word very loosely, as when Abraham said to his nephew, Lot, “…we are brothers” (Jerusalem Bible, Genesis 13:8).  Since, therefore, Jesus was her only Son, on the Cross he gave her to his friend, St John, to look after.  “Woman, here is your son”.  Then, turning to look at St John, he said, “Here is your mother”.  And “from that hour the disciple took her into his own home” (NRSV, John 19:26,27).  And in so doing Jesus has given her to us to be our Mother too, and we must love and honour her as he does.

We honour Mary, too, because of the courageous support and love she showed Jesus throughout his earthly life – from his birth in Bethlehem and his childhood, through his Public Ministry to his death on the Cross.  Then her soul was pierced by unimaginable sorrow as old Simeon had foretold all those years before when Mary and Joseph took the child Jesus and presented him to God in the Temple. 

Statues

Now, just as in public squares statues are put up in honour of great people, such as Lord Nelson’s statue in Trafalgar Square, so in many of our churches we have a statue in honour of Our Lady who has received from God a far greater honour than we could ever give her, the honour of being the Mother of his Son.  A statue of Our Lady helps to make her more real to us, and by treating it with reverence we also show our reverence to her.  One way we do this is by lighting a candle before her statue when we kneel down there to ask her prayers.  And when we go out of church and leave a candle burning there, we can think of it as still doing her honour and as a reminder of the prayer we have offered.  And of course we can do the same before statues of other Saints.