DECEMBER 8,
2011-THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION: Gen: 3:9-15; Eph 1:3-12; Luke 1:26-28
BLESSED ARE YOU AMONG
WOMEN, VIRGIN MARY. That Mary is
uniquely blessed among all women by being chosen by God to become the mother of
his Divine Son is the meaning of her singular condition as the most holy of all
creatures. Her primacy is not confined to the women of her nation, or even of
her time, but includes angels as well as men and women of all times and places.
Thus blessed, and in view of preparing her for her role as Mother of the
Messiah who is Savior of all persons of all times, she was uniquely endowed
with such grace by God that from the beginning of her life she enjoyed God’s
favor in a measure that no other human person has known. So fully did she
belong to her Creator from the beginning, that, unlike the rest of us, she was
never drawn aside from Him by any interior attraction.
The many trials and sufferings she experienced did not arise from any
disordered impulses of her nature but came to her from the outside. This unique
privilege derived from what came to be called her Immaculate Conception, and is
this mystery that we commemorate at this altar today
If we celebrate this singular
favor bestowed on the Blessed Virgin of Nazareth with the offering of the
Eucharist, we do so being keenly aware that the grace she was favored with was,
and ever remains, the fruit given in anticipation of the suffering, death, and
resurrection of her divine son. No one was more aware than she that she owed to
the Son she bore and reared all that she was and all the high spiritual gifts
that were hers. The first verses of the Magnificat
reveal how conscious she was of receiving such gracious favors from God.
Strikingly she cries out with joy expressing the exaltation she experiences is
being so uniquely the object of God’s choice for the greatest of all
undertakings- the salvation of the whole of humanity and the eventual spiritual
transformation of the whole of the cosmos. She immediately acknowledges her
personal lowliness for so unique an honor as being made the mother of the
Savior. All is positive in her Annunciation. The angel speaks only of the high
dignity and future achievements of the Son she is to bear and rear; nothing is
stated or even hinted at concerning the suffering she was to undergo through
her intimate bonds with her Son. Only after forty days, when Christ is
presented to the Father in the Jerusalem temple, does Simeon’s prophecy reveal
to her that her role as mother of the Messiah was to be a source of sharp pain
for her as her Son fulfilled his mission that led to the fall as well as the
rise of many. He was to be “a sign that is contradicted” as well as the
salvation of many others.
This feast paradoxically, in
celebrating Mary’s singular grace of being in God’s favor from the moment of
her conception in the womb, draws to our attention the fact that all of us, at
the beginning of our existence as human, are alienated from the God who creates
us. Moreover, the world we enter upon our birth is in a fallen state.
Revelation has only uncovered this fact; we are not supplied with a detailed
explanation that clarifies the mysterious workings of the universe and of the
human state in such a way as to render clearly the original circumstances of
creation sufficiently as to allow us so to understand the world prior to the
Original Fall from grace. We know what the Genesis imagery and sketchy
description do tell us, in an account that takes the form of a myth that tells
of a true happening in terms that are consciously symbolic and evocative. What
emerges, to be sure, is summed up by