Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Immaculate Conception of the BVM
8 December 2021

 Observing the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary we contemplate the threshold of our salvation, because we celebrate the gift of God to Mary, the one He chose to be the mother of our Savior.  As we celebrate today how she was conceived free from all stain of sin in her mother’s womb, the womb of St. Ann, we celebrate that God was making good on His promise to save mankind.  With this in mind it is appropriate that we hear in this Holy Mass from the Book of Genesis.  We hear God’s words after the fall of Adam and Eve, in that sin we call “original.”  We hear of God’s plan to save mankind after sin had entered the garden of goodness God had made for His creation.

 In the selection from Genesis we hear what theologians like to call the “protoevangelion.”  That term comes from Greek and refers to the first proclamation of the Good News, the first proclamation of the gospel, that God has a plan to save us.  That first proclamation is verse 15 which has God speaking to Satan, the serpent, and saying: “I will put enmity [division, hatred, adversarial relationship] between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he [the offspring of the woman] will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel” (Gen. 3:15).  God speaks His plan to undo the sin and disorder that Satan proposed and introduced to Adam and Eve.  God proclaims that the offspring of the woman will strike a head blow, that is a mortal blow, to the serpent.  The fulfillment of this good news for salvation is finally found in the Cross of Jesus, in his sacrifice of his life for our salvation.  Why is the Cross of Jesus that mortal, head blow to the serpent and his cunning?  It’s because disobedience is at the heart of Satan’s relationship with God and Satan’s plan to bring ruin to God’s goodness.  Satan is that angel who fell because he would not serve God in obedience.  Disobedience is at the center of what Satan introduced in the garden and disobedience remains at the heart of our sins, for which we are personally responsible.  That’s why the Cross of Jesus is the fulfillment of this first announcement of the gospel: because the Cross is fundamentally about obedience.  God the Son, takes on our flesh, and he comes to do the Father’s will.  In obedience Jesus accepts the Cross and the punishment for our sins.  The obedience of the Cross undoes the disobedience inspired by Satan.  And thus, for you and for me, obedience to God is key to our salvation, an obedience that is demonstrated in our growth in holiness and our saying an increasingly committed “no” to sin.

 I’d like you to think about the value of the Cross in order to understand our faith in Mary’s preservation from sin in her immaculate conception.  The sacrificial event of Jesus’ death on the Cross is what saves us.  It is re-presented here at the Holy Mass and that’s why the Mass is so important to our faith and our entrance into Heaven because it places us in contact with the sacrificial value of the Cross.  I’m willing to bet that most everyone here believes the Cross is what saves us, even though it happened a few thousand years before any of us was ever thought of, or ever lived and walked the earth.  In other words, I bet most everyone here believes that God the Father saw the value of Jesus’ obedience and sacrifice on the Cross and applied the merit, the value, of that sacrifice, to people who did not live at the time and in the place where it happened.  God applies the value of the sacrifice of the Cross to those who will accept it in faith, and who will embrace it and conform their life to it.  God sees the value and the merit of the Cross and I bet you believe that its value is applied to you and to me a few thousand years later.  Here is what I’d like you to consider: If you believe the value of Jesus’ sacrifice can apply to you thousands of year later, can you believe and accept that God could see the value of the Cross and apply its value before it happened?  If its value could move forward in time to us, can God permit its value to go backward in time?  That is basically what we are saying in faith about Mary’s immaculate conception.  We are saying that God Who exists outside of time and Who sees and knows all things, could see the value of what His Son would accomplish on the Cross and He applied that value to Mary from the first moment of her conception in her mother’s womb.  Thus, God gave Mary the gift of saving her from the first moment of her life.  It’s not that she did not need salvation, no!  God saved her from the first moment of her life by the value of the sacrifice of Jesus which the Father could foresee.

 Why would it be important for God to have a plan to do this for Mary, the mother of our Savior?  If God’s plan was to send His Son in the flesh to be born among us, in time, in the normal course of human birth, then a human being, having inherited a fallen nature due to original sin, could not do anything but pass on fallen, sinful human flesh to Jesus.  But the Book of Revelation tells us that nothing unholy can be in God’s presence.  Much less together with Him.  God, the all-holy One, cannot coexist with sin.  It’s like oil and water; they don’t go together.  So, God’s preserving Mary from sin from the first moment of her life means she was being prepared for the role He chose for her in salvation: to give human flesh to the Son.  And by preserving her from sin, God the Father was making it possible to pass on to Jesus the pure flesh that could coexist with Him.  Mary’s being preserved from sin means she could provide for Jesus sinless human flesh in which to take up dwelling, in order to come to save us.

 Thus, the collect of this Holy Mass speaks well of what we believe in this aspect of our faith.  Listen to it again carefully: “O God, who…prepared a worthy dwelling for your Son, grant, we pray, that, as you preserved her from every stain by virtue of the Death of your Son, which you foresaw, so through her intercession, we, too, may be cleansed and admitted to your presence.”

 We celebrate in this solemnity the special gift of God to Mary.  A gift that was part of His plan, first announced in Genesis, to deal a mortal blow to Satan and the harm he had done to God’s desire for us to have Heaven.  Since obedience was the undoing of Satan’s disobedience, then obedience to God must be fostered in our Christian living.  And this is why Mary is for us such a great example and intercessor.  She is the one who said “yes” to God’s plan.  We heard of that obedience in the gospel: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.  May it be done to me according to your word.”  God has a desire for us to live in communion with Him now and forever in Heaven.  He has fulfilled His plan in Jesus’s sacrifice.  Today we celebrate the role He prepared Mary to occupy to bring us that Savior.  Looking to Mary and counting on her prayers for us we can walk confidently toward God trusting that by sincerely doing away with sin, by confessing it, and seeking to observe greater obedience to God now, we will be prepared one day to enjoy the fullness of obedience’s reward in eternal life in Heaven.