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Born for This: The Nativity of Mary

Born for This: The Nativity of Mary

Last updated on: September 13, 2026 at 10:43 am by Henry Karlson

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Born for This: The Nativity of Mary 2026-09-13T10:43:24-05:00 Henry Karlson

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Today, we remember the day Mary was born. Photo: Jim Womack and Anne Richardson- Birth of Mary, relief sculpture ACT ID: 51549 / Wikimedia Commons

Born for This

The height of natural humanity, what humanity is and is capable of, is presented to us in the person of Mary. It is not a man, but a woman, who represents this to God and to us. She inherited all the grace which had been given to humanity, and through humanity, the special grace given to the people of Israel, and with Israel, the special grace given to the tribe of Judah. She is the culmination of God’s preparation for the incarnation. In her, Israel finds itself to be great, its role in human history unlike all others. She was the one who would speak on behalf of us all when she was told God’s plan for her. She, likewise, speaks for the people of Israel, and will reveal their full and proper response to God. Will she do as God asks? Would she accept the gift God plans for her? If she does, humanity, in and through her, will also accept it. So when Gabriel announced to her what God intended, she showed her consent; she said Yes, when she said May it be done according to God’s will. Her Yes was a Yes to God, a Yes on behalf of Judah, on behalf of Israel, indeed, on behalf of humanity. In her, humanity says Yes to God, to God’s grace; in her, humanity gave itself over completely to God, even as she gave her whole self, including her flesh and blood, to God so that through her, the incarnation could take place.

For Mary to be free to say Yes, for it to be an answer that was freely given, and not forced upon her, she had to be free from sin; she truly had to be free from the confines of sin, to be what humanity was meant to be. Then, she could say yes or no to God, without reservation, without any constraints; sin would not have allowed that. But for her to be free, God had to work with humanity, preparing it, giving it grace after grace, so that such grace could be used to help guide her development in human history, so that all of it could be found coming into her. Such grace allowed her to be born free from sin; but once she was born, she could sin; she could still deny God. She was to decide for herself if she were to repeat Eve’s fall from grace, or if she would do what Eve did not: fully open herself up to God, to say Yes to what God wants, and in doing so, help establish a new beginning for all humanity.

Thanks to her Yes, the incarnation could and would take place. God became one of us. God the Word, God the Son, eternally begotten by the Father before all ages, entered into history, and was given birth by Mary. She has become Daughter Zion, the representation of Israel, the representation of humanity; she is the one who was seen by God from all eternity. God knew, from God’s eternal vision, that she would be the one who would answer Yes. God knew and worked with history, using the grace unleashed in the incarnation, the grace of the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world, to help human history lead up to her so she could be full of grace, free to answer Yes to God. For, as St. Cyril of Jerusalem said about God and God’s knowledge, God knows all things and works in and with that knowledge:

He foreknows all things and is mightier than all. He knows all things and does as He wills, not subject to any sequence of events or nativity or chance or fate, perfect in all things and possessing in equal measure every form of virtue. He neither diminishes nor increases, but is ever and in every way the same; who has prepared chastisement for sinners and a crown for the just. [1]

Mary’s birth, her conception was a miracle, highlighting the grace given to her, for her parents, Anne and Joachim, were an elderly couple who came to believe and accept they would not have any children. This not to say they didn’t desire one, for they did, but it seemed as if God had decided against it. And yet, they were given a miracle, one filled with grace; that grace healed them of their sorrow and longing so that when they came together in their marital embrace, full of love, that love blossomed forth and Anne conceived. The miracle of her conception, and with it, the miracle of Mary’s birth, was all the result of grace, grace which remained with her and allowed her to become the Mother of God, the Mother of the Word made flesh.

Through the special grace given to Mary, in and through her family line, she became the one who could represent to the world what it means to be an authentic, free, human person. That’s what her grace first gave to her. The freedom of unfallen humanity. The freedom to make a choice for all of us. The freedom to truly say Yes to God, so that God can answer that Yes with the incarnation, where God not only becomes one of us, but raises us up, making us something even greater than what our natural, unfallen state would allow us to be. Mary is a person who comes to us, not in pre-history, like the mythic Adam and Eve, but in the middle of history itself. We can know her as a historical person, and talk about her as a historical person, even though she is also more than that, due to the graces given to her, and the role she has in history:

In Mary, Jesus is begotten by Mary’s humanity, and this means that he is begotten under the sign of contradiction, conflict, division. Mary is the symbol of this humankind in which God’s newness takes place and in which the poor have their turn because the announcing of the Kingdom starts with them.[2]

Mary was not chosen at random. She was chosen from all eternity. We must always remember, she was a woman, a special woman, who lived out her life in perfection. Every step of the way, every moment of her life, was a life which she lived with a freedom no one before her ever experienced. But it was still a life like everyone else’s. She still had to be born. She still had to grow up and become ready for the time when Gabriel would come to her and announce the good news. She had to be taken from grace to grace, awakened to God’s plan, so she could accept it: “Adam was put to sleep to give birth to a woman. Mary was awakened to accept God in her flesh. She had to hear God’s offer. She had to respond to his invitation.”[3] When she does, she says Yes, it was not just for herself, but for all humanity. And she shows us something else. We can all be freed from sin, born again in grace (through baptism), and live a life open to God, going from grace to grace, finding ourselves taken into Christ – and once we do that, like Mary, we must recognize ourselves as becoming servants (handmaids) to the Lord, emptying ourselves of all pride, all vanity, all vainglory, all hatred, indeed, all vice, detaching ourselves from all that would turn us away from God. For, if we are going to join ourselves with Christ, to be incorporated into his body, we must share in with Christ’s self-emptying love, for by it, we shall be glorified, even as Christ was glorified, even as Mary was glorified:

Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:5-11 RSV)

We are called to be like Mary, to be servants of the one who himself came to us to be our servant, giving birth to him in our hearts; we must cast aside our vainglory and humbly follow Christ, doing the will of the one who loves poor humanity, indeed, who loves all creation. We must allow ourselves to take on Mary’s Yes for ourselves, to look for and find our true nature, our humanity, and embrace it. When we do so, we will find ourselves embraced by the Word of God. God took on our humanity and became human through Mary. God saw her from all eternity; God knew her even before she was born. This did not mean she did not have freedom, but rather, she had the greatest freedom possible, and God knew what she would do through that freedom – that knowledge did not undermine it, but rather, affirmed it, as God affirmed the choice she made, the decision she made, and honored her for it. Likewise, God now affirms us when we make a similar choice, helping raise us up and become like her, and if we do so, we will be honored, like her, and with all the saints, for we will have lived our lives for God and in the process find ourselves sharing in the divine life itself.

[1] St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis and Catechesis 1-12. Trans. Leo P. McCauley, SJ and Anthony A Stephenson (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1969), 122 [Catechesis IV].

[2] Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, Mary Mother of God, Mother of the Poor. Trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989), 64.

[3] Archbishop Joseph Raya, The Abundance of Love: The Incarnation and Byzantine Tradition (Combermere, ON: Madonna House Publications, 1989; 3rd ed.: 2016), 25.

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