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).
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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