|
CHRISTMAS ON CAMPUS HOMILY Father Jim Heft reflects on "Supernatural Family Planning." Feast of the Immaculate Conception This evening we gather to celebrate the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, who is the Son of God. This year also marks the 150th anniversary of the declaration of this teaching as a dogma of the faith, and the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the monument to the Immaculate Conception, located on the lawn between the library and St. Mary’s Hall. That monument was a gift of the students of St. Mary’s Institute, as this educational institution was then known, to mark the 50th anniversary of this dogma. And finally, it is the 41st year in a row that we have been gathering as a community to celebrate this special feast as a culmination of the Christmas on Campus event. What does the Immaculate Conception mean? Why should we care about it? And what difference does it make? First, let us consider what it means. We should be clear at the outset that we Christians don’t celebrate doctrines; rather we celebrate God’s gifts where they are to be found: in people. And tonight we give thanks to God as we celebrate Mary conceived without original sin. We are not concerned with the biological specifics of her conception nor are we stating that we know something special about the time Mary spent in her mother’s womb. Rather, we are saying that Mary was, and is, radically holy. Catholics sometimes confuse the Immaculate Conception with the Annunciation, our Gospel text this evening. While they are different—the Immaculate Conception is about Mary’s conception and the Annunciation (or Incarnation) is about Jesus’ conception—they are not unrelated. Mary was specially blessed, and in view of her future role as the Mother of Jesus, redeemed by God’s grace. She too needed to be and was saved, or better, was preserved, from sin. Her preservation from sin happened not through any merits of her own, but rather because God wanted to prepare a place for his Son. You see, God prepares people for the roles they are to play in life. With the help of our parents and friends, for example, God supplies us with the talents we need for the work that he wants us to take up. We speak of this reality as our vocation or our calling. This preparation is not just an afterthought on the part of God. In fact, it is, if you will, a forethought, and in the words of the second reading from Ephesians, God has prepared the way for us, chosen us to be holy, “even before the foundation of the world.” We have trouble planning for exams; God plans from all eternity. We believe that Mary, in view of the love and grace offered by Christ, was preserved from original sin. You might ask, “How can this be? Mary didn’t even know about Jesus until she was fifteen or sixteen.” But the love that God has for each of us in Christ is not limited in time. Otherwise, those who were so unfortunate to live before Jesus was with us on earth would not have had a chance for salvation. Just think of that: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Miriam and Rachel and even Adam and Eve, would have no chance for salvation since they lived way before Jesus did. And in the similar way, what about all those folks, perhaps the majority of the human race today, who know nothing about Jesus—are they doomed too? No, because they are not responsible for their ignorance. God’s love and saving grace works in very mysterious ways. And so did God’s grace work mysteriously to preserve Mary from sin. This teaching, the Immaculate Conception, is a sign that the salvation won by Christ was active among all humanity even before his birth. So tonight we celebrate the way in which God prepared a particular person, Mary, for her role as the mother of his son, Jesus. You all have heard of natural family planning. Well, this evening we could speak of God’s supernatural family planning, in that He prepared Mary from the beginning of her existence to be holy, to be full of grace, so that she could respond fully to the invitation the angel offers her in this evening’s Gospel, to bear God’s son. Just as God calls the foolish to confound the learned, he called Mary, a simple and holy Jewish teenager, to be the mother of his Son. Everyone agrees that the prevention of disease is better than having to be cured of a disease. In fact, it often takes more skill to avoid sickness than to be cured of sickness. In this sense, Mary was even more dependent on God’s saving grace than we are. We are all called to be holy, but in Mary’s case, she was preserved by the grace of Christ. Now to be sure, each one of us is called to be holy and through baptism original sin is removed from our own souls, but some of its effects remain, effects we battle throughout our lives. In Mary’s case, however, there never was a time that she was the property of this world. Why should any of this matter to us? Well, at least according to the Gospel, it seems that God in all his wisdom and power, actually asked through the angel Gabriel for the consent of Mary to be the mother of the savior of the world. She was well prepared for this invitation, even though she was greatly troubled. Even though we say Mary was sinless, we need to remember that being sinless did not prevent her from being irked when Jesus left her and her husband Joseph without telling them, walking off at the age of twelve to chat with scholars in the Temple; nor did being sinless prevent her heart from being pierced with a sword of sorrow when she saw her precious son in front of her dying, nailed to a cross. Nor did being sinless prevent her from times of deep darkness, as our present Pope said of her in one of his apostolic letters. Being sinless intensifies her vulnerability, her sensitivity, her sorrow and her love. She questioned, wondered, pondered and hoped, and must have been totally confused when she heard her son cry out from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” But what did she do then? She remained faithful, standing there at the foot of the cross, continuing to hope, but at a loss as to how that hope might be fulfilled. It’s no secret that many of our Protestant brothers and sisters have trouble with this doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. They see no basis in Scripture for this teaching; and indeed there is very little in Scripture that explicitly suggests this teaching. They also sometimes think, and I say wrongly, that we Catholics worship Mary, that we believe she didn’t need to be redeemed and is a sort of goddess for us, a fourth member of the Trinity. But in truth she was redeemed and she is not a goddess. Her sinlessness is a gift from God, and because of it she made a commitment to be faithful to the fruit of her womb—no matter what. After all, she uttered those great words, which all of us should repeat, “Let it be done unto me according to thy Word.” That is, whatever you wish of me God, I will do. And about Jesus she once said to others, “Do whatever he tells you.” That is, her advice points us always to Jesus. In this, she models what we should aspire to be: desirous of doing God’s will and ever ready to look at Jesus in order to understand what it means in human terms to obey God’s will. While explanations such as these might not persuade Protestants that they should venerate Mary as we do, they should at least help us to understand why we celebrate tonight what God did for all of us in and through Mary—namely, gave us Christ his Son. Mary makes a difference, a huge difference. She exemplifies what every one of us is called to be—a person who is fully responsive to God’s invitation, not knowing where that invitation will lead us. Mary is for us a model of fidelity, a person prepared for such a commitment from the first moment of her existence. Even though as a teenager she was troubled by the angel’s greeting and invitation, she didn’t try to negotiate, didn’t ask for assurances or some premarital contract, or as some couples do today, for “a prenuptial agreement.” Nor did she did try to keep her options open. She committed herself as fully as she was enabled to by God’s grace and proceeded to obey her Son whom she nursed and taught how to pray. Indeed, we do celebrate an extraordinary mystery this night. One final reflection: why do we celebrate this feast in the middle of Advent? I suggest that we celebrate this feast because it is one of great hope, because God prepared Mary for a role she embraced, and because God can also work wonders in and through us, even though we are weak and sinful. And we are especially hopeful tonight because we know that God will prepare us for what he wishes us to do, support us in the doing of it, and bring that good work, in time to completion. In Mary we see what we all hope to see someday in ourselves: the ability to be faithful and to bring forth Christ for others. James L. Heft, S.M. Footnotes 2 Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission: Final Report 3 McCabe, p. 211. 4 George
Weigel, Letters to a Young Catholic
(Basic Books, 2004), p. 60. |