“Holy And Blameless” — Us!
Monday, December 9, 2024
Second Week of Advent
Patronal Feast Day of The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Gn 3:9-15, 20/Eph 1:3-6, 11-12/Lk 1:26-38 (Lectionary #689)
Why is it a doctrine of faith that Mary was “conceived without sin”? What does that say about her? About Jesus? About us?
The Prefaces for the feasts of the Immaculate Conception and Assumption call Mary God’s “sign of favor to the Church in its beginning and the promise of its perfection.” The focus of both doctrines is not so much on Mary as on what her immaculate conception and assumption into heaven say about God’s plan for the Church. For all of redeemed humanity. For each one of us. God chose her to be “the beginning and the pattern of the Church in its perfection, and a sign of hope… for his people on their pilgrim way.” Karl Rahner wrote that the Immaculate Conception is a preview and a promise of our “immaculate conclusion.” What Mary was from the beginning of her life we will be at the end of ours. That is the Good News of our salvation.
The Opening Prayer(s) say that the “image of the Virgin is found in the Church.” God made her a preview by letting her “share beforehand in the salvation Christ would bring [to all] by his death and kept her sinless from the first moment of her conception.” This encourages us to ask God to “help us live in your presence without sin.” Is it too much to ask that we should be “without sin” as Mary was?
In the Prayer Over the Gifts and Prayer After Communion we ask God by “her prayers” and by the Eucharist, the “sacrament of your love,” to “free us from sin.” We have not been free of sin from the beginning of our lives, but the fact that Mary was is a “sign of hope” for us on our “pilgrim way.” The power to preserve is the power to purify. God can make us all as free of sin at the end of our lives as Mary was at the beginning of hers. That is the message of the Immaculate Conception.
A Promise of Victory
Genesis 3:9-20 is a story of defeat that ends in a promise of victory. First God says to the serpent, symbol of the power of evil, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers.” Humans have not capitulated to evil. They abhor it. They may fall, but they will fight.
Even our guilt is consoling. Priests who hear confessions come to realize that what they hear in Confession is not sins, but ideals! To confess a sin as sin is to look down on it — which means something in us has risen above it. So, recognizing sin is most deeply an experience of recognizing our agreement with God in accepting his ideals. That is an experience of grace!
In Confession, the experience of being in union with God by grace should outweigh our experience of guilt. Guilt makes us aware of what we have done. Confession makes us aware of what we are. God looks at the heart, and he judges us for our actions only in the measure that they express our hearts. What our sins reveal most commonly is that our hearts are divided. We say with Paul too frequently, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want …. I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind…” (Romans 7:19-23).
In confessing our sins, we see the distinction between our actions and our hearts. The “evil we do” is not what we most deeply want to do. God has “put enmity” between the “offspring” of Eve and the “offspring” of the powers of evil. Even though we keep failing and falling in battle, we still side with God.
Eventually, humans will win. God told the serpent, “He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” The head is more vulnerable than the heel. John wrote, “All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not mortal” (1John 5:17). For a sin to be “mortal” it must “strike at our head,” not our heel: we must choose it with sufficient knowledge of the evil involved. (St. Paul raises the question of “mind set”: Romans 7:23, 25). And it must also strike at our heart — we must give full and undivided consent to the evil we do. Finally, the action itself must be, not just “bad,” but evil —so evil that in choosing it we are rejecting our Baptism and renouncing our share in the divine life of God.
The Church has no defined, dogmatic teaching about what actions are so evil that they constitute the “grave matter” required for “mortal sin.” That is left up to our common sense and enlightened moral judgment. In the period prior to Vatican II preachers and teachers got carried away — probably with a sincere pastoral desire to frighten people away from truly damaging sins — and declared so many things “mortal sin,” to be punished with eternal damnation, that they made God look like a monster. We are still trying to recover from that.
“Son of God”
When Genesis says, “He will strike your head,” the “he” did not refer to Jesus. But in Luke 1:26-38 we see that in fact an individual man will strike the death blow to the power of evil. Mary is told, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (see Matthew 1:21). “Jesus” (Yeshua) means “Yahweh saves.”
Jesus is the Savior. Uniquely. “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven… by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The reason is simple: Jesus is God. We say in the Gloria at Mass: “You take away the sins of the world…. For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High.”
The term “Most High” is used twice in this passage: “He will be called the Son of the Most High… and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” Here we get to the essential reason why Mary had to be “conceived without sin.”
This phrase means that Mary, from the first moment of her existence, was never under the power of sin in any way. The rest of us are. Ever since sin entered the world, every culture is infected. And since “cultural conditioning” — for good and evil — is a component of every human existence, we are all “doomed” from our mother’s womb to be “programmed” to many destructive ways of thinking and behaving before we are even old enough to make a free choice. This is the result of “Original Sin” and of all the sins, original and not so original, that shape our society. It does not make us guilty but sets us up to make a lot of free choices, eventually, that will involve personal sin and guilt. No one escapes. Why did Mary?
Because Jesus was God, he could not have taken flesh that was ever under the power of sin. Therefore, the flesh of Mary, from the first moment of its existence as hers, had to have been exempt from the power of sin. She was culturally conditioned, like everyone, but not in a way that could distort her attitudes or diminish her values. The “Immaculate Conception” was necessary, not to honor Mary, but so that the flesh of the “Son of God” would never have been under the power of sin.” Its true focus is on Jesus, not Mary.
Holy and Blameless
Problem: by taking us, with all of our sins, into his body on the cross, Jesus “became sin” (2Corinthians 5:21). And now his flesh, over which sin never had any control, is partially under the power of sin in us, his “pilgrim Church,” who are truly his body on earth.
Solution: Ephesians 1:3-12: God “chose us in Christ… to be holy and blameless before him in love.” Jesus took sin into his body to destroy it — totally. Our sin has no power over him. He has power over it. “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word.” At the “marriage of the Lamb” he will “present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle…. holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25-27). At the end, we will be “immaculate.” “Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous deeds” (Responsorial Psalm (98).
Insight: Do I believe that in heaven I will be as free from all the effects of sin as Mary?
Initiative: Decide seriously that you want to “be perfect.” Don’t expect it tomorrow, but work for it today.
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