All Believers Can Be Bearers Of The Word Of God

Saturday of the 27th week in Course 2023

I think this brief Gospel gives us words that either Jesus or His Mother could have proclaimed. As usual, there’s a big crowd around Jesus, perhaps hundreds clamoring for attention, for encouragement, for healing or forgiveness. A woman raises her voice and shouts the equivalent of “Jesus, I wish I were your mom, bearing and nursing you.” Adulation. Praise that misses the point. Mary did not say “behold the handmaid of the Lord” to the angel in order to be known as the Mother of the Messiah. She did so because her Lord and God asked her to do it. She did not risk ridicule and stoning at the hands of up-tight Pharisees–if Joseph had not done the right thing and claimed Jesus as his own–to get honor or pleasure or riches. She did it to bring forth the Savior of the world, as the angel promised.

So Jesus said the only logical thing to the woman: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” There can be only one physical Theotokos, the one who bore the Son of God. But by our listening and obedient faith, every one of us can be spiritual bearers of the Word of God.

That brings us back to an early bearer of the word of God, the prophet Joel. At least four different insect species have invaded Israel and are destroying all the crops. They were like the early invading army of the Midianites who left nothing for Israel to eat or wear. Joel paints pictures of the plague as the end of the world. For those who died of the famine that resulted, it was the end indeed. And Joel gives the judgement: it’s because of the sin of the Israelites themselves. Just the opposite of the faith and obedience of Mary that Jesus wants in His disciples.

But here at the end of Joel’s prophecy, we see the flip side of those words. Repentance by the people of God will bring a mighty judgement in their favor. The nations who used Israel and Judah as political footballs would come up to the great Valley of Decision, down between Mt. Tabor and Mt. Carmel, and be destroyed by the power of the true God. The vines would give grapes and the hills would be covered with cattle for milk, and the long drought of goodness would end, both on the land and in the hearts of the people. God is good; Jesus is Lord, and by adhering to Him and his teachings, we will have gifts both in this life and even more in the next.