Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
8 Dec 2023
Gn 3: 9-15.20
Ep 1: 3-6.11-12
Lc 1: 26-38
This is the first time in this new liturgical year that we hear the Gospel of the Annunciation. We shall hear it proclaimed again on the 20th of December and also on the very eve of Christmas, on the 4th Sunday of Advent. This repetition is not painful, on the contrary. This page of the Gospel seems to be inexhaustible. You hear it, you meditate on it, you live with it in your heart, and there seem to be always new layers of meaning and beauty to discover.
Today, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the stress is perhaps more on God’s design of salvation. God loves the world He has created. In the same love, He wants to save it and to promote it, to bring it to its perfection. Most especially He wants to save the children of Adam and Eve. These have, as we know, a rather sad family story. But sin, fall, exile out of Eden, even corporal death, all of these are not the last words about human destiny. With God there is no final full stop. Life is always beginning anew, as a new gift, issuing from God’s eternal newness.
Mary, in her Immaculate Conception, is the first fruit of this newness, the beginning of the final gift of God. She belongs fully, from the first moment of her life in St Anne’s womb, to the world made new by the Redemption which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit effect in unison. She belongs to it, and she serves it. She cooperates with the Divine Persons.
Of course, as a human being, she grew in grace and wisdom, thus entering more and more into her vocation and her mission. The Annunciation is the moment when Mary is fully able to formulate her place in the drama of Redemption: “I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word”. She has understood and she fully accepts that she exists for the Lord and for whatever the Lord will ask from her. She does not live to herself, but to the Lord (Rom 14:8).
Hence Mary’s freedom. She is totally free of ambition, personal projects, attachments, personal views. She is available for whatever God does, whatever God gives, whatever He may ask from her. In her mind, in her heart, and in her actions, she submits to God’s will. She obeys and she serves with total trust and without looking for a reward.
The angel Gabriel calls her “O favoured one”. He designates her as a human being uniquely blessed by God’s grace. This very grace expresses itself in Mary’s obedience which makes possible the unfathomable mystery of the Incarnation. What humility, what trust, what freedom she needs to have to accept with simplicity her mission as “Mother of God”!
The Immaculate Conception of Mary is, at is were, interior to Mary’s Divine Motherhood. We see the Mother of Jesus. We realise that she is the Mother of the One who is God and man, and therefore the ‘Mother of God’. We understand that this mission was not imposed on her without her free consent. We discover in her a freedom and a suppleness in the hands of God that is not compatible with sin. She appears to us in her sinlessness. In the light of the Holy Spirit and guided by the teaching of the Church, we recognise that she has never been tainted by sin; that she was conceived in a state of grace; that she was Immaculate from her conception.
Therefore, we admire, we adore, and we praise the powerful and sweet design of God’s Providence at work for the salvation of the world. Mary, who received first the fulness of redemption, opens a new era. In this time of grace, the whole creation is given anew to itself, by a new gift of love and life, a new creation. With Mary, this new world becomes a gift to God in return – a sacrifice of praise, an eternal adoration in thanksgiving, a canticle of pure Joy. Through Mary’s Immaculate Conception, the Joy of God enters the world never to leave it. Let us rejoice and give thanks! Chairè! Rejoice! Hail, Mary!