When one of my grandnephews was born, he was so tiny that when I first met him, he fit easily into his father’s hands. Today, he is a tall, strapping young man. I suppose that I could apply to him the saying, “From tiny acorns mighty oak trees grow.” The acorn is the seed of an oak tree, and today in the gospel we hear of the miraculously fertilized ovum of Mary, now a noticeable fetus; the divine-human seed of her son has been growing in her womb. At first, this is to the consternation of Joseph who has not yet taken her into his home, the second stage of a Jewish marriage at that time. But he is calmed by a heavenly message which informs him that the child is conceived of the Holy Spirit, and that this child will save us all from our sins. Yes, he will be our Savior, Emmanuel, God with us.
What does that in face mean, that Jesus is our Savior, or Redeemer? I certainly could never buy the medieval ideas that “redeemer” meant the Father, as actual Redeemer, redeemed or ransomed us back from Satan and that Jesus was the redemption price that was paid. No. I have in the last few years tried to find the best simple statement of how we are saved or redeemed. Reading our Trappist brother Dom Eugene Boylan’s book This Tremendous Lover, I came upon this passage, “When we ask ourselves the question, ‘How did Christ redeem us?’ we find the answer is: by making us part of Himself.” Yes, by making us part of Himself. He became part of Mary, his Mother, in order to make Mary and all of us part of Himself—members of his Mystical Body, the Church, divinizing us by our union with him and truly humanizing us by our union with his resurrected and glorified human nature and with the glorious Ever Virgin Mary.
Here let me explain why I brought up the word “seed.” I will have to discuss a little biology. Please bear with me. The word “seed” significantly appears in the second reading this morning from Romans where it is prudishly buried by the translation: the words “descended from David” are literally in the Greek “of the seed of David.” That was indeed the translation in the Douay-Rheims Bible when I was young. This word “seed” reflects the ancient understanding that the complete seed (or sperma in Greek) came from the man and that it contained a very tiny human being who upon entering the womb was nourished into a full-sized fetus. It was thought that the woman contributed nothing but nourishment through her blood. Great minds in the Church (such as St. Thomas Aquinas) inferred that there must be more to the story than this, but they lacked the precise instruments and science we have today.
In the 17th century and especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the microscope was developing greater and greater accuracy, scientists discovered the woman’s ovum or egg which was, in fact, the other half of the human “seed.” Thus, for most of Christian history the source of the human nature of Jesus could incorrectly be understood as not coming from Mary at all, but from a complete divinely implanted seed—Mary’s physical contribution being only nourishment and protection. Both the ovum and the sperm are in themselves incomplete cells until they combine with each other to form the zygote cell (the real human seed) that then divides and differentiates into a fetus. In Mary the fecundating power is from the Holy Spirit, but the fertilization of the ovum from her results in a natural zygote, and so the fetus grows naturally. The human soul of Jesus is miraculously infused by God in the same way it is miraculously infused into every human person. It is important to remember that everyone you meet is not only a wonder of God’s creation in nature but is also a miracle of God’s intervention in nature. No one is “garbage” as some people are now saying.
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 485 we read, “The Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, is sent to sanctify the womb of the Virgin Mary and divinely fecundate it, causing her to conceive the eternal Son of the Father in a humanity drawn from her own.” IN A HUMANITY DRAWN FROM HER OWN. The paragraph describes, using general terms, the miraculous fertilization of the ovum of Mary and its implantation in her womb as the zygote. With the science we now have we can say that Jesus and Mary share the same DNA—his humanity is drawn from her own. Mary of Nazareth is truly the physical mother of the man Jesus in the same sense that I am the son of my mother Mary Truhan. A contemporary canard against Mary that she is a surrogate mother is shown to be baseless. Indeed, Jesus is the Son of God, but also Mary’s son without question. Also, the miraculous conception of Jesus through the creative power of the Holy Spirit prevents any haploidy or chromosomal anomaly in the child.
The Catholic Church and our religion are often criticized for being too Marian. I would answer that if the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, is seen as very Marian in its nature, culture and prayer, it is because the humanity of Jesus Christ himself is Marian and that St. Luke implies that the teaching and example Jesus received from Mary as a child blossomed in his teaching as an adult. Perhaps, he resembles her not just spiritually, but also physically. After all, Mary and Jesus share the same DNA. We are called to share in a grace of spiritually resemblance to Christ and Mary through the Holy Spirit who overshadows us all with his transformative power.
The Vatican Council proclaimed in its first document Sacrosanctum Concilium that the humanity of Jesus united with the divine person of the Word is the instrument of our salvation. Thank you, Mary, for your Son and for the encounter with his body and blood, soul and divinity that you helped to make possible for humanity in Christ’s earthly life, then in our Baptism and now in this and every Eucharist, our living Bread of Eternal Life, our Cup of Blessing, and the pledge of our salvation. Through it we become ever more and more part of Jesus Christ Himself in his Mystical Body and grow personally in holiness. As Dom Eugene Boylan wrote, “When we ask ourselves the question, ‘How did Christ redeem us?’ we find the answer is: by making us part of Himself.” Let me close with a quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church which connects our membership in the Body of Christ with Mary’s holiness—the first sentence of which is profound, “The Church’s structure is totally ordered to the holiness of Christ’s members. And holiness is measured according to the ‘great mystery’ in which the Bride responds with the gift of love to the gift of the Bridegroom. Mary goes before us all in the holiness that is the Church’s mystery as ‘the bride without spot or wrinkle.’ This is why the ‘Marian’ dimension of the Church precedes the ‘Petrine’”
