Vigils Reading – Our Lady of Guadalupe

THE SIGNS OF SALVATION by Carlo Cardinal Martini2

Human persons are hearers of God’s word and find fulfillment by putting themselves and their lives totally in an attitude of listening to the word of God manifested in Jesus. Jesus came to us through Mary and so through a person formed by Jewish cult and culture and history. But Jesus didn’t come for Jewsalone and so he had to make God’s word known to Greco-Roman peoples too. If you read the opening chapters of the Gospel according to St. Luke you will see how the Jewish story of God’s incarnation was retold for a Greco-Roman audience. These people, after all, were called to share fully in God’s promise of salvation but couldn’t hear the promise if

spoken only in Jewish cultural ways of speaking.

What God says to us through Mary by her role in the incarnation is so important that there have been what we call Marian apparitions all over the world. When we celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe we recall one of these, and what God gave her to say to the Native American peoples. The words are in Native American language and “picture writing” and expressed using the forms of courtesy and piety of those peoples. Mary appears as one of them and builds a cultural bridge to Europe by giving St. Juan Diego, a Native American, Castilian roses for the Bishop of Mexico City. They weren’t being grown in Mexico but picked from a miraculous bush growing on Tepeyac hill. It was to persuade the bishop. Even more persuasive was the word written on Juan Diego’s tilma, the picture of Mary as a Native American.

What was asked was a church where God’s word given through Mary could be proclaimed to Native American peoples. In many of their languages an unexpected opportunity is called “a flower of God” and in picture writing a word is painted as a flower. One doesn’t pick it but cultivates it so all may share the beauty. St. Juan Diego was chosen to cultivate the flower, God’s word saying “Mary” as the centerpiece of the small church the bishop let be built. Mary said to Juan Diego just what Jesus said to us on the cross—I am your mother, and added that she would show Native American peoples God’s love for them. She began by showing them the respect of speaking their language, wearing their clothes and using their form of writing. Mary really knew her Native American cultural anthropology!

Advent is a time dedicated to sharing the Gospel… sharing God’s word as we have personally heard it. It is also a time for speaking of the signs and wonders God has worked for us and for our own people. We are to speak it in a language, perhaps a kind of sign language, which those with whom we share can understand in a way that penetrates to their hearts. St. Juan Diego—who had been the equivalent of a Knight in Aztec society and culture—spent the remainder of his life explaining God’s message, given through the sign of the Virgin who bears a child, to all the Native Americans who came to the little church to see God’s word and sign to them. They turned to God by the thousands. We have the same task, and who know what wonders God will work through us