Saturday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time [I]
Baruch 4:5-12,27-29  +  Luke 10:17-24
October 5, 2019

… I have seen the captivity that the Eternal God has brought upon my sons and daughters.

Saturday is dedicated by the Church to our Blessed Mother.  From the many persons and places in the Old Testament which foreshadow Mary, today’s First Reading presents one:  the city Jerusalem.  We might wonder how a city can represent a person, or vice versa.  In this case, one link between the two is that both are mothers.  In today’s First Reading, this mother speaks to her children.

In our modern culture, we might find it strange to think of a city as a mother, but this was (and still is) a common idea in older cultures.  In our own modern Western culture, the mobility of families makes this idea harder to see.  But in cultures where many persons are born, grow, live and die in the same city or town, the words of today’s First Reading are easier to grasp.  For them it’s easier to see one’s “hometown” as a mother, shaping one’s life and identity.

“I have seen the captivity that the Eternal God has brought upon my sons and daughters.”  We can take these words of Jerusalem and place them instead on the lips of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  She continues, “Fear not, my children; call out to God!  He who brought this upon you will remember you.”  Through these words Jerusalem foreshadows the compassion of Our Blessed Mother.  We can picture her on Calvary as described in the Gospel account of the Beloved Disciple, who was himself entrusted to her care by Jesus:  “Woman, behold your son” [John 19:26].  One difference we notice between Jerusalem and Mary is the relationship of the mother to “the Eternal God” to whom her children “call out”.  Our Blessed Lady is the Mother of God, having given birth to the Word made Flesh:  He who through her fidelity has taken on our sinful flesh.