10th Saturday in Ordinary Time (BVM) June 15, 2024

In the Rule of St Benedict, there is an entire chapter entitled “Restraint of Speech”. It begins, “Let us follow the Prophet’s counsel: ‘I said, I have resolved to keep watch over my ways that I may never sin with my tongue. I have put a guard on my mouth. I was silent’”. St Benedict comments: “Here the Prophet indicates that there are times when good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence”.

The prophet Elijah in the first reading gives us a good example of an esteem for silence. He came upon Elisha as he was plowing, and saw that he would make a good attendant. But he didn’t say a word to Elisha when he invited him to follow him. The reading simply says, “Elijah went over to him and threw his cloak over him”, and that was enough.

In the Gospel we heard the Word incarnate commending restraint of speech: “Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes’, and your ‘No’ mean ‘No’. Anything more is from the Evil One.” That is a counter-cultural teaching if ever there was one. With all of our modern stress on communication, whether written or oral, Jesus steps in and says that any speaking more than is necessary comes from the Evil One.

This is one of the things I think Jesus learned, not only from the scriptures, but from his mother. Mary said “Yes” when she meant yes, and it was the most important yes that was ever uttered: yes, she would conceive and bear the Son of God. But apart from her Magnificat and the intervention at Cana, the Gospels show us a Virgin who preferred to keep silence. Her life was largely a life of silence, a silence of adoration of the Word of God.

In the real presence of the incarnate Word of God, Mary enters into a new silence and is transformed by it after the example of her Son, the Word who reduced himself to silence. And like her Son, Mary’s life goes on, from silence to silence, from a silence of adoration to a silence of transformation.

Mary’s silence is not the silence of someone who is hesitant in speaking or someone who is helpless. It is a silence more eloquent, if I may say so, than her own Magnificat. After Cana, everyone in the Gospel speaks, and Mary says nothing at all. Her experience of the Word made silent made her all the more silent when the Word chose to speak. All Galilee and Judea is stirred up by Jesus, and Mary keeps a holy silence.

The reason for her silence is given to us by St Luke: Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. Like her, may we and “all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand” before the King of kings, made flesh in the womb of Mary, made really present on our altar.