Immaculate Conception
Dec. 9, 1996
Eph 1: 3-6, 11-12
Provincial House, New Rochelle
On Thursday, Dec. 8, this year I celebrated 2 well-attended parish Masses in Champaign and preached without a written text. Here's a vintage text for you.
“God
chose us in [Christ] before the world began, to be holy and blameless in his
sight” (Eph 1: 4).
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The Immaculate Conception
St. Benedict's Church, the Bronx, N.Y.
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The
sacred Scriptures today offer us a mini-course in the history of salvation. We recall the fall of mankind. We praise God’s “vast eternal plan” (to use
Tevye’s words). We hear the beginnings
of God’s restoration of his plan after the fall disrupted it.
“God
chose us”—every man and woman—“before the world began, to be holy in his
sight.” Just how that election, that
divine choice, was to be “in Christ” before the world began, before the world
needed redemption, is less certain. We
may let the theologians dispute whether or not the 2d Person would have become
man had man not sinned.
But
we did sin. So, passing from the
hypothetical to the actual, we discern God’s plan as it has unfolded. His election of us to be holy and blameless
before him after the fall is effected by the ministry, death, and resurrection
of Jesus our Savior, Son of the Most High (Luke 1:32), by our call through
Christ Jesus to receive the divine favor and become God’s adopted children (Eph
1:5-6).
God
has effected his plan with the necessary help of a specially chosen woman, the
2d Eve, the 2d “mother of all the living.”
The son of the Most High could become the Son of David only by becoming
human, by inserting himself into Jewish history by birth into a Jewish
family. Therefore God specifically chose
Mary of Nazareth, chose her to be his “highly favored daughter” (Luke 1:28),
chose her “in Christ before the world began, to be holy and blameless in his
sight, to be full of love”; to be not only a highly favored daughter but even
the mother of his own Son.
God
chose Mary to be the 1st to share in the mystery of Christ’s salvation. He chose her not for herself but for his
plan, “according to his will and counsel” (Eph 1:11), as he once chose Abraham,
Moses, and David. The plan does not
exist for Mary, but Mary for the plan.
So she recognizes herself as “the handmaid of the Lord” and submits
herself completely to “his will and counsel” (Luke 1:38). It is this submission, this humble service,
of course, that contrasts Mary of Nazareth with Eve of Eden and makes Mary the
bearer of Life rather than of death.
God
chose, God predestined, Mary “to be holy and blameless in his sight, to be full
of love.” He bestowed such a fullness of
blessing upon her in Christ—“such was his will and pleasure” (Eph 1:5)—from her
beginning, as soon as she began to be in the world. Unlike us and the rest of our fallen race,
she entered the world “full of love,” full of grace, already enjoying the
divine favor—in view of Christ, in view of what God meant to do in Christ—in Christ,
but not without the handmaid of the Lord.
The
2d Eve gave birth to Jesus, and “in him we were chosen” too for the praise of
God’s glory (Eph 1:12). As God knew and
chose Mary “before the world began,” so did he know and choose us: not “to be holy and blameless in his sight, to
be full of love” from the 1st moment of our existence, like Mary, but to be so
from the moment of our birth into Christ, and, like Mary, as long as we remain
united with him. “Likewise he
predestined us through Christ Jesus to be his adopted sons—such was his will
and pleasure” (Eph 1:6)—that we might join OLJC and Mary of Nazareth in
praising the divine favor in the Church on earth and as part of the Church in
heaven.
Mary
was chosen and made holy in view of Christ her Son and of her part in the
divine plan. We are chosen and made holy
in Christ for a part in the divine plan too.
Ultimately our part is to praise God’s glory. But like Mary we have a part, some humble
servant’s part, to play that will advance God’s plan on earth. May it be done to us as he says.
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