TOTD, October 11

Listen and Carry Out His Words

From the passage from Luke 11, we can see this interesting thing:

This woman is deeply impressed with Jesus and his ability to hold the crowd’s attention with his healing and his story telling. She does the most natural thing in the world: she thinks how proud his mom must be to have raised a child to become such a man, and she congratulates the child by blessing the mother with a beatitude: “Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed.”
When Jesus answers—“Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it”—it may sound at first as if he is deflecting the compliment to his mother by using it to make his own point, as if he has said that anyone who does God’s will is greater than his mother. In fact, he increases the honoring of his mother. He is saying, in effect, “Greater even than her human mothering of me is the way Miriam has heard the word of God and carried out that word.”
( by Dennis Hamm, S.J., http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/101009.html)

Let’s ask God the heart of Mary. The one who listened to God’s words and carried out that word. Let’s do our best to listen and carry out His Words in our life. (-fon-)

While he was speaking, a woman from the crowd called out and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed.” He replied, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”
—Luke 11:27-28