Mary - Part of God's Plan

Homily for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

Whenever someone makes a plan of action, the first thing that is thought of is the goal. Once one knows the goal, a plan can be made to reach that goal. Today’s feast is a celebration of one of the steps in God’s plan of salvation. The goal of that plan, as we all know, was the Incarnation.

The Incarnation was not simply static event, something that is often referred to as “one and done.” The mystery of the Incarnation continues yet today each time Jesus is revealed through the many different ministries and works of the Church. Because each of us is a member of that Church, we are each charged with the duty to continually make Jesus real in our world.

Today we celebrate the Immaculate Conception. John Henry Newman, reflecting on Mary’s nurturing of the child Jesus, wonders in one of his sermons what the mother of the Lord – the one who cares for him, heels his bruises, and encourages him as a child – what she should be like who had such an important function. He says that if John the Baptist was sanctified by the spirit before his birth, shouldn’t Mary be prepared in a similar way for the birth of her son? From her birth, Newman says, she was without sin in order that she might surpass all the saints not only in her holiness but also in being the first to benefit from the grace of Christ.

All of us baptized people receive the life of God within us; this means we become the children of God, destined for eternal life, members of the body of Christ, branches on the vine that is Christ. The great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner wrote that Mary is like us in receiving the gifts of God’s grace, but the difference is that she had those gifts from the beginning of her earthly life. What God gave to the mother of his son pictures for us what grace intends for all of us. What God gave to the mother of his son was given to prepare her for that honor; in our case that closeness to God is given only after our birth. In both cases it is made plain that such a good gift is just that, a gift, something we could not have produced ourselves.

Everyone, Mary included, at all times receives salvation and closeness to God as a gift. We observe in Mary immaculate the first and untainted example of the gift and love God intends for every human being. In her willing and generous response to the angel, we have a model of the responsiveness to God’s grace that allows that gift to change us. Mary, mother immaculate, pray that we learn in this Advent to be ever more open to what God intends to do in us.