BEHIND THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.
December 8, 2022.
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin
Mary.
“Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.” (Luke 1:28)
A Chinese proverb says: “He who stays near vermilion gets
stained red; he who stays near ink gets stained black.” And a Pakistani proverb
adds: “One who is free to sin, sins less; the very power weakens the seeds of
sin.”
Today the Church celebrates the solemnity of the Immaculate
Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. "Macula" is Latin for “stain.”
This day the Church celebrates the conception of our Blessed Mother without the
stain of sin. What we profess here is that Mary, the blessed mother of our Lord
and Savior, because of what God wanted her to be his Mother, was preserved by
birth, from all marks or stains of sin. We refer here to the "original
sin", the sin we all inherited from Adam and Eve. Mary was preserved from
the original disobedience attached to all mankind. It happened so with her, not
because of particular merit, but by God's grace and election.
Behind the Immaculate Conception, what we truly celebrate is
God's great work, God's love, and God's mercy. The dogmatic proclamation of 8
December 1854 by Pope Pius IX says: “the Blessed Virgin Mary, from the first
moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God,
and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, was
preserved free from every stain of original sin is a doctrine revealed by God
and, for this reason, must be firmly and constantly believed by all the
faithful...”
Mary, by God's grace, was set free from sin, "from
every stain of original sin..." She has not inherited the Adamic
disobedience. Therefore, she can, without fear, open herself totally and
without reserve to God's will. Mary’s "Fiat voluntas Tua" to God
takes its origin from the mystery of her conception. Her humility springs from
that same mystery, and her motherly care for the child Jesus, keeping all
things in her heart comes also from that same mystery. She was preserved from
sin to be fully and wholly a mother.
The Catechism says: "To become the mother of the
Savior, Mary "was enriched by God with gifts appropriate to such a
role." The angel Gabriel at the moment of the annunciation salutes her as
"full of grace". In fact, for Mary to be able to give the free assent
of her faith to the announcement of her vocation, it was necessary that she be
wholly borne by God's grace." CCC 490.
What we celebrate today is the splendor of a unique holiness
of which Mary is enriched in order to enrich our human nature of God's love and
presence among us.
In the first reading, we are given to meditate on the
original fall, the disobedience of Adam and Eve to God's order and its
consequences. The Lord expelled them from the garden for not keeping his
command. One thing that strikes the attention in the narrative of the original
sin is the refusal of our personal responsibility in front of sin. When the
Lord God asked Adam what he had done, Adam accused Eve: “The woman whom you put
here with me she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.” When the Lord
turned to Eve, she accused the serpent: “The serpent tricked me into it, so I
ate it.” And certainly, if the serpent was asked to explain its action, it
would accuse the fruit for being delicious, and the fruit would accuse the
tree, and the tree the soil, and the soil God... It is never our responsibility
when we sin. The fault is always others. This is also one of the fruits of our
being children of Adam. God decided to punish his creature and announced the
original curse: "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.” This curse will be conjured only by Jesus, the Savior. But for him to be
born, God predestined Mary, preserving her from the consequences of the curse.
The Archangel Gabriel, appearing to Mary to announce her
God's plan, greeted her in a mysterious way: “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is
with you.” The very words we reecho when saying the Rosary. Mary is made full
of grace because the Lord has chosen to be with her. She became special because
of God's plan for her. Therefore, she could not but say Fiat to Him who filled
her with his grace. By the ‘yes’ of Mary to God's will, a correction was
brought to Eve's ‘no’. By her obedience, the curse started to be conjured and a
new dawn drew for our salvation. Jesus, the Son of God was entering our
humanity to save us from slavery to sin.
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