On Thursday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time our Church invites us to read and reflect on a passage from the book of the prophet Isaiah (11:1-16) entitled "The root of Jesse and the return of the remnant of God's people". Our treasure, which follows, is from a treatise On the Hail Mary by Baldwin of Canterbury, bishop.
Baldwin of Forde was Archbishop of Canterbury between 1185 and 1190. The son of a clergyman, he studied canon law and theology at Bologna and was tutor to Pope Eugene III's nephew before returning to England to serve successive bishops of Exeter. After becoming a Cistercian monk he was named abbot of his monastery at Forde and subsequently elected to the episcopate at Worcester. Before becoming a bishop, he wrote theological works and sermons, some of which have survived.
A devotion to the Hail Mary prayer can be traced to the 1100s. Abbot Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1184 wrote about a devotion to the 'Hail Mary' prayer and said, "To this salutation of the Angel, by which we daily greet the most Blessed Virgin, with such devotion as we may, we are accustomed to add the words, "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb," by which clause Elizabeth at a later time, on hearing the Virgin's salutation to her, caught up and completed, as it were, the Angel's words, saying: "Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb."
The book of Isaiah is filled with sobering accounts of Israel's sin and rebellion and warnings of their coming judgement. But along with warnings, Isaiah also offers a message of hope—a suffering servant, a coming Messiah, who would come to establish God's Kingdom on Earth and create a new Jerusalem.
