Blessed is she that believed

In the first chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, many amazing things are said about Mary, the mother of Jesus, beginning with verse 28:

And the angel came in unto her, and said,
Hail, thou that art highly favoured,
the Lord is with thee:
blessed art thou among women.

We hear more of this in today's Gospel (Luke 1:39-56).

Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb....

Behold, from henceforth
all generations shall call me blessed.

Obviously all of this relates to Mary becoming the mother of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ - part of the very center of salvation history, but otherwise perhaps not very relevant, it might seem, to our day-to-day lives.

But Mary's becoming the mother of her Lord and Savior was not a matter of random chance: it was entirely a matter of grace and faith - and that is very relevant to our day-to-day lives.

Without that grace and faith, Mary could not have been the mother of Jesus. Grace and faith are fundamental and primary, as our Lord reminds us later in Luke's Gospel (11:27-28):

And it came to pass, as he spake these things,
a certain woman of the company
lifted up her voice, and said unto him,
Blessed is the womb that bare thee,
and the paps which thou hast sucked.

But he said, Yea rather,
blessed are they that hear the word of God,
and keep it.

You and I cannot aspire to give biological birth to Christ, but thanks be to God we can aspire to grace and faith.

You and I might not be able to aspire to be called blessed among women or for all generations like Mary, but by the grace of God you and I can aspire to be people of faith like Mary and to have it said about us, like Mary:

Blessed is she that believed:
for there shall be a performance of those things
which were told her from the Lord.