Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Friday, December 8, 2023
(Genesis
3:9-15.20; Ephesians 1:3-6.11-12; Luke 1:26-38)
Sin like sewerage
contaminates everything it touches. The
primordial sin of Adam and Eve rejects God’s authority. Its perversion does not end there,
however. Both man and woman proceed to wrongly
cast blame on others. The man accuses
the woman of giving him the forbidden fruit.
The woman says the devil tricked her into eating it.
The pollution of
sin is not definitively arrested until Jesus dies on the cross. Even then, as we know, sin seeps through
cracks in the human make-up. Mary,
however, shows herself in today’s gospel as the one exception to the universal allocation
of sin. Faced with a divine mandate, she
has no concern for herself. Her question
about how she was to conceive and bear a son is a call for orders on what to
do. Despite being given an exotic answer,
she answers definitively. She will do
what God wants.
Today we ponder
the exception of Mary to the universality of sins in human persons. We may see it in two ways. First, we notice that what happens to Mary
happens to us at Baptism. Christ frees
us from sin so that our lives might, as the reading from Ephesians claims, give
him fitting praise. Second, in Mary’s
singular case, sin has not tainted her immaculate beginning. From the start, her will is dominated by her
intellect which, in turn, is fixed on the Holy One. She can tell the angel in today’s gospel without
reservation, “’May it be done to me according to your word.’”
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