The
baby in the cot may be quite passive and vulnerable to the whims of others, but
he is also quite safe and will never again be so receptive; he is all ear, all
eye, no judgment, no defensive irony.’ This observation on the relative innocence from which we all originate, by the contemporary
British novelist Patrick Gale in his most recent novel Mother’s Boy, seems very relevant to the mystery of perfect innocence we celebrate today. While innocence practices total
receptivity spontaneously, sin breeds obtuseness, judgmentalism, and fear
leading to self-defense. But let us here and now wake up and see the truth before
us. Like today’s resplendent full moon shining with incandescence into the
pre-dawn darkness, Our Lady’s radiant purity reflects to us the beams of the
Sun of Justice, Christ our Lord, that infuse life into our souls.
Sinlessness,
to us poor sinners, is a state of soul and a relationship with God which by its
very nature is as unimaginable as it is intensely desired. The long practice of
sin, the habit of rebelliousness against God and the resulting alienation from
him who is the very Source of our being, have all put us humans in a condition
of self-contradiction, indeed, on a course of self-destruction. Unbelievably,
we rebel violently and consistently against the very thing we most desire and
most desperately need. We yearn for sinlessness as for a lost paradise, because
we know that only there intimacy can thrive with the God who is our joy and
only hope. We know instinctively that only the sinless person, only the person
free of all slavery to the self, has the pure heart required to see and enjoy
God as he is, in the fullness of his majesty, beauty and love.
For
this reason, in celebrating today the feast of the Immaculate Conception of our
Blessed Lady, we are at the same time celebrating that urgent longing that inhabits our deepest heart that impels us to
emigrate once and for all beyond the stifling realm of sin and enter the
Kingdom of God’s pure love. There, we are predestined to take our place in the
assembly of the saints gathered around the throne of the immaculate Queen of
Heaven, whom the Eastern Church lovingly honors with the singular title of Panaghía, ‘the All-Holy One’.
All
three readings this morning showcase God’s fidelity
to the human race, which constitutes the sturdy backbone of the single
story of salvation related to us by Scripture. The reading from Genesis drives
home the crucial centrality and durability of God’s very first promise to man, what has been called the proto-evangelion or ‘first Gospel’. God’s
words on this occasion are also a prophetic preview of the development of all salvation
history. God promises our first parents that, in the unrelenting hostility
between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent, it is the
woman’s progeny who will eventually carry the victory. The Lord says to the
tempter-serpent: I will put enmity
between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers. He will strike
at your head, while you strike at his heel. A hit to the heel may cripple,
but one to the head is lethal. The Mother of the Messiah, Mary of Nazareth, is
here prefigured as the leader in a new faithful people—‘the poor of the Lord’—who
will oppose evil and serve God’s project of salvation whole-heartedly. By
conceiving the Christ and bringing him forth into the world, Mary sows in our
earth the indestructible Seed of goodness, justice and hope. This seed, Jesus
the Savior, will take root among us and transform the whole of humanity from
the inside.
The
Genesis story stresses one major consequence of original sin: it makes man cast off all responsibility for his deeds.
First, Adam blames his wife for the catastrophe: The woman whom you put here with me—she gave me fruit from the tree,
and so I ate it… Eve, in turn, blames the tempter: The serpent tricked me into it… (3.12-13). The disobedience of sin
makes us fall into the perverse mechanism of always blaming the other for everything
that goes wrong. (As far as my ego is concerned, only I am immaculate!) By
stark contrast, the Gospel presents Mary as a woman fully in touch with her
inner being, a woman steeped in the truth who tenderly yet robustly assumes
responsibility for the message the Lord is entrusting to her: May it be done to me according to your word
(Lk 1.38), she says with rare boldness. In the second reading St Paul exhorts Christians
to assume responsibility for the level of
charity in the world, in order both to live and to share the holiness grace
has bestowed on them, since God intends us all to follow our Mother in her
innocence: [The Father] chose us in
[Christ], before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish
before him. In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus
Christ.
As mother
and figure of believers, Mary is shown by Luke to believe the impossible: she, a virgin who has no sexual relationship
with a man, is told she will have a son, and she believes it. She thus teaches us
that faith is a force that prevents us from lying down and giving up when
confronted by an apparent dead-end. Faith is a force that urges us not to yield
too meekly to what feels like a relentless fate or an oppressive destiny. Mary’s
bold faith is the kind that does not surrender to the inevitability of death
and to the inexorable grinding of the laws of nature, evidenced in Elizabeth’s
old age and hopeless sterility, in Mary’s own very unpromising virginity, and above
all, in Christ’s destiny of death. Faith chooses to rely wholly on the God to
whom nothing is impossible, the God who raised Christ from the dead.
In
today’s gospel of the Annunciation, Mary questions but she does not doubt; the
purity of her freedom of will, and her detachment from the workings of her
individual reason, enable her spontaneously to take God at his word simply
because it is God who speaks it. Her perfect obedience to God’s message surges
from her serene holiness and corresponds fully, at the human level, to God’s
own eternal wisdom and power. Her faith is so untainted, robust and dynamic,
that she not only hears God’s words
spoken to her by the angel, but, as a result of this generous hearing, she conceives God’s eternal Word in her
womb. Boldness of faith, indeed, always results in the conception of the Word!
Unlike our Mother, we not-so-immaculate Christians are often afraid of grace, afraid of being passionately
loved by God, or anyone else for that matter. We are afraid of a love that we
know will wreak havoc on our selfishness. However, the Blessed Virgin,
unshackled by sin, dared to say to God: ‘Here I am! Do to me and with me whatever
you will!’ We, in our spiritual wishy-washiness, want to belong to God and
share in his glory and bliss and at the
same time cling to what we regard as indispensable vices. We often pray in the equivocal manner of
the sixteen-year-old Augustine: ‘Give me chastity and continence, O Lord, but not just yet!’ Such is our cowardice
and lack of freedom.
Mary is
the believer par excellence because her
faith became a choice, at a precise moment in her life; and this faith had
a revolutionary impact on her existence, including her very flesh. Mary’s
faith, her fiat in response to the archangel’s
words, causes a change in her body, which is now drastically reshapen by the freshly
conceived Child she suddenly finds herself carrying in her womb. We are
astounded, and rightly so, by this result; and yet faith always follows this pattern: even the tiniest act of faith, if it
is genuine, will take body in our life, will modify our existence, will become enfleshed
in our world. And then we must accept the consequences of our generous
adherence to God’s will, whether these consequences are gratifying or not.
In
praising Mary, we are principally
praising the work of God in her, as
well as the courage of her faith in the face of the unknown. For Mary, to be
‘immaculate’ means that she is fully consecrated to the Kingdom and the work of
the Kingdom. Her ‘immaculateness’ is the very opposite of either passivity or
indifference or ignorance! Mary puts herself fully at the disposal of God’s
designs for the whole world. How much more ‘global’ could someone’s believing
heart become? Our Lady’s greatest accomplishment is to be the one human being
who has, from the beginning of her existence, fully embraced the salvation
offered her. As a consequence, she becomes a fellow worker with her Redeemer
Son in the Father’s great project of spreading salvation to all humanity—from
the anxious flight into Egypt to the foot of the Cross.
Now, by our baptism, we ourselves are called to play the very same role as the Mother of God, the Theotokos, ‘she who gave birth to God’. When we were created, God already intended that we, like our Blessed Lady, should also, like her, become theotokoi, God-bearers, not of course in her unique, all-encompassing manner of motherhood but nevertheless in a true and dynamic spiritual way. That is what Christian disciples ought to be: birthers of the living Word, which presupposes that the incarnate Word pervades our whole being. Everything in our nature, in our heart, in our soul’s deepest yearnings, is geared to precisely this vocation. The act of bearing God to the world over a lifetime is the demonstration that our union with God is real, because whoever houses God and sits down at table with God must yield divine fruit for the benefit of the many. In this, as in every other aspect of our life of faith, our Blessed Mother Mary is our precursor, our model, our intercessor, and the cause of our joy. Through the hidden alchemy of faith and love, the power of her immaculate heart can come to the rescue of our sinfulness, if we would but summon her. For, what mother does not run to the rescue of her children, to make up for their blunders, deficiencies and even crimes? And this is all the more true so when the parent in question is the compassionate Mother of all those living the life of Christ, whose most beautiful name is the Lover of Man.
