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The Immaculate Conception, Most Highly-Favored Lady

The Immaculate Conception, Most Highly-Favored Lady

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 4:24 pm by Scott Eric Alt

The Immaculate Conception, Most Highly-Favored Lady 2017-03-09T16:24:56-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Bartolome Esteban Murillo, “The Annunciation,” 1650s

Joachim and Anne must have known. It is the kind of grace that will stand out, if your child never sins. If your child never once talks back to you, it is a good bet you will notice. If your child is never disobedient, if your child never has to be corrected, if your child in short behaves in a way no child or person has ever behaved, you will be aware. How they must have marveled at their daughter, and wondered at the purposes of God. I do not know whether Mary’s parents may have suspected that something related to the promised Messiah was the cause of her immaculate conception; I do not know whether they lived long enough to find out. There is a tradition that says they did, and that Jesus was with them when they died. I would like to think so. But either way, they certainly knew what it meant to watch and wait upon the Lord, who has made all things, including our understanding, perfect in its time.

THY SON SHALL BE IMMANUEL AS SEERS FORETOLD

The prophecy was more than 700 years old by that time. Joachim, Anne, and Mary knew it well: “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots” (Isa. 11:1). For more than 700 years—longer than their captivity in Egypt—Israel waited for the restoration of the kingdom. They were captive to the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans. If any nation had known exile, it was Israel. If any nation understood what it meant to watch and wait upon the Lord, it was Israel.

But then, Israel is a figure for all of us. We are made outcast by the evil around us; we are made outcast by our own participation in it. And so we wait for the promised restoration; and God, as it seemeth, delays and delays. Still He calls us to patience and faith. His promise has never before been left unkept. God will bring us back; He will restore us.

And once in Israel (Luke 1:26-38), Gabriel came to Mary, white and holy and flaming, and told her that the son she would conceive would fulfill the old promise and be Emmanuel. She was frightened and perplexed. Even the sinless Mary was astonished and out of sorts when confronted by the holiness of an archangel. But Gabriel calms her and explains: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”

Mary responds with holy consecration and holy acceptance: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” But she does not have complete understanding, and we are told that she “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). She was perfectly sinless, and she knew perfectly how to watch and wait upon the Lord. She knew to let it be as God’s word had told her, to treasure it, to wait for it in her heart—a heart that rests in Him with perfect trust, even when we lack sure knowledge of the ways of God.

But Mary did not need to understand everything. She watched and pondered as she carried God in her womb. She watched and pondered as she raised Him from a child to a man. (She was the only perfect mother to bring up a perfect son; Joseph must have felt like such a worthless outsider in that family!) She watched and pondered through his three-year-ministry, through his arrest and ultimately his crucifixion, and through Pentecost. And still her understanding of the fullness of truth, of all God is and all he plans, was imperfect. She waited on God to reveal to her her great role in salvation history.

Most highly-favored lady!

TO ME BE AS IT PLEASETH GOD

We wait and we continue, and still we do not understand. We do not have to. We are doing as we should. When John the Baptist came to prepare the way, the first instruction he gave was: “Repent.” He did not say: “Take up arms against the Romans.” That is significant. Many in Israel believed, and knew, and thought they knew, that the Messiah would come as a conquering Jewish Caesar. They wanted the restoration of their kingdom, but they forgot that the reason they lost their kingdom was not merely because an evil nation had enslaved them. The Jews were themselves the evil nation, and time and again they rejected the God who had freed them from slavery and built them into a kingdom. They were exiles not because their conquerors were wicked, but because they were wicked. And so the first call in restoration is always repentance.

How utterly fitting it was, and still unexpected, that the God who came to free us from sin would first make one woman sinless, and come to us through her. In Mary, God achieves, in the single moment of her conception, what He takes our whole lives to achieve in us. In Mary, we contemplate the fully human person God intends for us to become. (To err is not human, but inhuman.) Mary was the first to prepare the way of the Lord. So we must repent, that we, like her, may prepare for God to reside within ourselves.

Christ came to free us from our sins, for it is only thereby that we may be restored to the kingdom we have lost. But the kingdom is not of this world. It is an error that human beings never seem to stop making, however often we are reminded: We want our nation back, by which we mean the Caesar we prefer. But Christ comes to give us the heavenly Jerusalem. For we were made for the heavenly Jerusalem. And if Advent can teach us anything, in addition to patience and repentance, it is that we should stop thinking in political or earth-bound categories, and think instead in spiritual and eternal ones.

Because he was not the Messiah they thought he ought to be (does that sound familiar?), Christ was rejected of his people. The kingdom was restored, but not in a way anyone could have expected: Christ founds a Church upon the rock of Peter, and the Church is Israel—not in that God has rejected the Jewish people, but so that the “fulness of the Gentiles [will] come in” (Rom. 11:25); and then God will restore the Jewish people. The Church Militant is not a worldly kingdom, but a heavenly kingdom of sinners in the process of being restored. They are in the world; they are not of the world.

God always fulfills his promises, but at a time of His choosing and not in a way we expect. Would it not be better if God told us the answer to every question that would perplex our minds, so that we would not spend so much of our energies in imagining falsely and blaming God for not achieving our salvation in the way we dreamed He would? But no. It is a virtue to learn to wait on Him. It is a virtue to have faith. It means nothing to be certain of all things. I suspect even in Heaven there will be mysteries, and consecration to them, and a holy waiting upon revelation.

It is certain that when Gabriel came to Mary, she had known none of God’s full plan, and very little of it would be revealed to her. But she asked Gabriel only one question: How could she possibly conceive a child? When Gabriel told her it would be by the Holy Spirit that she would conceive, she said, “So be it,” and asked no more. Mary was not a theologian; she was content to simply say yes to God, and wait.

Mary teaches us holy waiting. In her meeting with Gabriel, she teaches us to be servants and handmaids of God’s ways (not our own), to ponder, to wait, to watch, to prepare the way of the Lord, as once she prepared it—even in her very womb.

Most highly-favored lady!

***

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