Monday, December 9, 2024

9 December 2024 - every spiritual blessing


And coming to her, he said,
"Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you."

Here we read in an obscure way what the Church would come to increasingly understand as Mary's Immaculate Conception: "The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin" (from Ineffabilis Deus, the papal Bull that defined the Immaculate Conception). 

In our first reading we see that the disobedience of Eve was part of what allowed death to enter into the human story. But she was thus implicated because Adam failed in his duty to guard the garden. Although he sat at elbow's length from her when the serpent tempted her his courage failed and he did not intervene. So in a way it was Adam's failure that allowed Eve's fall. But with the Blessed Virgin the opposite happened. Jesus' victory allowed Mary herself to be covered in grace by which she would be able to believe God and obey him. Any normal daughter of Eve would have been too wounded by concupiscence and sin to give the wholehearted response necessary for our salvation. But Mary was to be God's first move in a plan which would realize the reversal of the fall from grace that took place in the garden of Eden.

Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you shall name him Jesus.

We might have expected the new Eve to be a woman Jesus took as his bride, as this would provide, seemingly, a more precise parallel with the first Adam and Eve, except that it was not fitting for Jesus to single out any individual in that way, since he desired to espouse the whole human race to himself. But what he sought for this role was something which he found in Mary (because he himself had given it to her): perfect receptivity to the will of God. It was receptivity which would first welcome Jesus into the world but which was sufficient to extend even to those whom he would make his brothers and sisters by adoption.

The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.

The grace of the Immaculate Conception prepared Mary for something more than simple motherhood. She was prepared to be a vessel of God's presence and a tabernacle where he would take on flesh and dwell among us. The Holy Spirit would come upon her and the power of the Most High would overshadow her even more majestically than the cloud rested upon the tent of meeting during Israel's exodus from Egypt.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who has blessed us in Christ
with every spiritual blessing in the heavens,
as he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world,
to be holy and without blemish before him.

Mary was a perfect example of what God intends for all of us to a lesser degree. We have all been chosen in advance, before anything we could do to merit anything, to be recipients of "every spiritual blessing in the heavens". Let us learn from Mary how to be receptive to this grace so that these blessings may be fully unleashed in the world, leading to an increase of the presence of Jesus himself within our world.

All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation by our God.


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