Lk 2:41-51
[or Mt 5:33-37]
41Each year [Jesus’] parents went to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, 42and when he was twelve years old, they went up according to festival custom. 43After they had completed its days, as they were returning, the boy Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. 44Thinking that he was in the caravan, they journeyed for a day and looked for him among their relatives and acquaintances, 45but not finding him, they returned to Jerusalem to look for him. 46After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, 47and all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers.
48When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” 49And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” 50But they did not understand what he said to them. 51He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart.
HEART: As a biblical image, “heart” (Hebrew leb, Greek kardia) is the seat both of human emotion and of mind and will. When Mary is presented in the gospel as keeping the angel’s message in her heart, it means she is giving to God the totality of her person: mind, will, and heart.
The “immaculate heart” of Mary refers to her whole person and harks back to her “immaculate conception,” that special gift which is the fruit of her election to be the mother of the Son of God. By virtue of grace and by reason of the redemptive merits of her Son, Mary was preserved from the inheritance of original sin. Mary possesses an immaculate heart: the basis for this is the “new name” given her by the angel: “full of grace”—kecharitomene (Lk 1:28).
Luke presents Mary as a woman of faith and obedience. At the annunciation, she answers the angel Gabriel: “May it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38), even if she does not fully comprehend what God’s calling entails. Here she does not understand either the mysterious words of her 12-year-old son, why he should cause anxiety to her and Joseph. Neither is Simeon’s prophecy clear to her. But Luke presents her pondering this happening in her heart. Her “obedience of faith” during the whole of her life’s pilgrimage entails knowing and humbly recognizing “how unsearchable are God’s judgments and how inscrutable his ways” (Rom 11:35). Her immaculate heart accepts fully everything that is decreed in the divine plan.