Thursday, December 8, 2022

Homily for the Solemnity of Immaculate Conception

Homily for the
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

Dec. 8, 2022
Collect
Eph 3: 1-6, 11-12
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph Residence, N.R.

“O God, … you prepared a worthy dwelling place for your Son” (Collect).

(Velasquez)

We celebrate today the greatest wonder of God’s grace, what he did in the soul of Mary of Nazareth, “preserving her from every stain” of sin.

The collect is careful to credit Mary’s grace of sinlessness to the power of Christ’s death.  It’s our joy and our blessing that the power of his death also touches us whom the Father “has blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, as he chose us in him” (Eph 1:3-4).

Yes, the Father has chosen each of us no less than he chose Mary.  He has cleansed us after the fact of our sin, both original sin and personal sin, but his cleansing “by virtue of the death of [his] Son” is real.  Because it’s real, the Father is forming us, too, into “worthy dwellings for [his] Son.”

In the 1st reading, the man blames the woman for tempting him to disobedience, and he also blames God for putting her in the garden with him (Gen 3:12).  It’s not my fault—it’s hers, and yours too!  And the woman blames the snake for deceiving her (3:13).  It’s our human propensity to blame everyone but ourselves for our failures.

It’s ironic, then, that our pardon and our redemption can come only when we confess our failures.  Then the Lord can do marvelous deeds (Ps 98:1), even making us “holy and without blemish” (Eph 1:4), like Mary.  For that is “the purpose of the One who accomplishes all things according to the intention of his will” and enables us to praise the glory of God (Eph 1:11-12), like obedient, cooperative Mary.

Obedient, cooperative Mary now intercedes for us, her guilty, contrite brothers and sisters that by the grace of her Son we “may be cleansed and admitted” with her to God’s presence (Collect), to dwell with him and with her without fear, without shame (cf. Gen 3:10), and ultimately without sin because that is God’s purpose for us in Christ.

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