(Please read the Scripture passages first, before the homily.)
Today we are still celebrating the Birth of the Lord Jesus.
St Paul was emphatic, that God had sent his Son, born of a woman. He was saying that this Son of God had a human nature by being born of a woman. St Paul wrote born of (=from) a woman, not merely born in a woman. He showed that this human nature was a real thing because it came from her human body, not simply in her body. He asserted that this person born of a woman was the real God with a real human nature as well. St Paul was asserting that this Son of God was God and also Human.
The Church echoes this by calling this woman the Mother of God. She is Mother of the person who is God and therefore the Mother of God. She gave this Son his human nature but the Son did not lose his divine nature. By becoming the Mother of Jesus, she became also Mother of Christ and Mother of God.
The emphasis is not on the Mother but on the Child. Who is this Child? He is a person, first of all. He is human and has a human parent. He is the anointed one of God, the Christ. He is also God. This one person gathers in himself the nature of God (what makes God God) and the nature of a human being (what makes humans human), all this in a perfectly well-balanced personality.
Wow, that is deep theology! In some sense, this is easy to grasp because we have grown up with this idea. On the other hand, it contains a deeper theology.
There was a purpose why God sent his Son born of a women. It was to that we humans might receive adoption as sons. In other words, the sole reason why God humanized himself was so that God could divinize us.
God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts so that we could recognize God as our Parent and cry out, “Abba, Father.” So God sent his Son into the world as a Child of his Mother so that this Child could make us recognize ourselves as children of God. If, then, we are children of God, we are also heirs of God. We are part of God’s family.
The emphasis remains, not on the Mother, but on the children. It remains on God and it calls us into God’s own life. It proclaims at the same time that God has accepted our human life into God’s own divine life.