The human face is a very interesting thing. It can express a range of emotions without speaking a word. Happiness, pleasure, pain and fear are all immediately recognizable. So much so, that in early childhood education, pictures of smiley faces and sad faces and several other simple face pictures might be used to help children express how they feel and to learn to recognize these feelings in others. Reading another’s more obvious emotions is key in our ability to communicate with them.

A face or a facial feature is usually the first thing about a person that we put into our memory. People do not easily forget a face, though they might forget a name. The face is an important part of one’s identity.

When someone meets me for the first time, they might notice that I have facial hair, that I wear glasses, that my eyes are green.

My eyes, the wrinkles around them and the shape of my mouth as well as my disappearing hairline are gifts from my father, while my hair color, nose and cheeks are from my mother. When people see me, whether they know it or not, they see bits of my parents.

Our first reading today is one that we are more familiar with than we might think. It is the passage where God gives to Moses the formula of a priestly blessing. Since it was from God, the people could be assured that the blessing from the mouth of the priest might be heard by God and the blessing would granted.

It asks that the “Face of God” might shine on the Israelite and by extension, to us, that God might “smile on us”.

But these could not be literal, as no one had ever seen the face of God and lived.

Our names also help to identify us. It is a tag, a moniker and a legal label. It helps, along with a face to allow others to recognize us.

I was named for my father, but William doesn’t describe who I am at my core, but it does make it easier to call me to supper.

In biblical times, however, names meant something more than they do now… and a name given by God, or changed by God had great significance.

Abram to Abraham, Isaac to Israel, Simon to Peter…. Those names were descriptors of their persons, who and what they were.

At the end of today’s Gospel we here that Our Lord was given the name, pronounced by the Angel, of Jesus, “Yoshua” in Hebrew.

It means “God Saves” and so we see that His name IS descriptive of who He was and is. It was both His name and His mission, the very reason for His incarnation.

But between the priestly blessing and our Lord being named, we hear, once again, of the Nativity.

Today is the Feast of Mary, Mother of God. We celebrate it every January 1st, exactly one week from Christmas. This feast reminds us of a reality that is very easy for us to forget, but is made implicit in the second reading.

That God came to us, became one of us, and he did so as a baby.

Not one that just appears, which God could have done, but He chose to come through a woman. With our images in art and music and poetry, we can lose sight of the very gritty fact that Mary conceived a child, though not in the usual way. She carried Him in her body, nourishing Him from within for nine months with all that entails.

And when the time came, Paul says that it was the “fullness of time” He was born of that same woman.

He did not look like the statue of Baby Jesus in our manger scene.

He was small, and pink and wet and wrinkled. He was weak and tired and hungry. He might have shivered from the night air and He needed His mother. Mary fed Him, giving of herself in a way that only a mother can. In all of this we are reminded that Mary is the mother of the Child, a miracle that any mother can attest to.

But the deeper miracle, the wonder of all wonders is that when she looked into His face for the first time, she saw something no one had ever seen before…. the face of God.

The promise of the blessing given to Moses so long ago, is now fulfilled, God has a face, a human face! It can look and shine upon His people and I am sure Mary was the first to be blessed by God’s loving smile.

This most blessed of all women was and is indeed, the Mother of the second person of the Trinity, a person, a baby that is consubstantial…. of the same substance, as the Father, yet lying in her arms, dependent upon her. She is the Mother of God.

And so she treasured, she pondered all of this in her heart. Today the Church reminds us that we should do the same.