HEAR IINSTRUCTION, AND BE WISE!

A REFLECTION FOR THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

We think of our Blessed Lady as a character of the New Testament, and indeed, she does rightly belong there.  She is first mentioned by name in the first chapter of St. Luke—we hear this in today’s Gospel, when the Evangelist describes the sending of the Archangel Gabriel to a city of Galilee, Nazareth, “to a Virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the Virgin’s name was Mary.

We should remember, however, that our Lady was born under the old covenant, and was probably in her teenage years when the Angel Gabriel appeared to her.  Her life did not begin with the first chapter of St. Luke, but several years before that.  Life, of course, does not begin at birth, but at conception, and it is this great event in man’s history that we celebrate today.  For this was a conception unlike any other.  It was an “immaculate” conception, a stainless conception.  The rest of us were conceived with the stain of original sin inherited from our first parents.  The Blessed Virgin Mary was not.  By an exceptional privilege from God, she was never sullied by any stain of sin, be it actual or original.  She was, as St. Gabriel declared, “full of grace.”

We should take the time to recall how this great privilege came about.  As part of God’s plan for the redemption of mankind, it was not some spontaneous idea to make her conception immaculate.  God’s plans have no beginning or cause, they simply have been from all eternity.  Our Lady was “conceived” in the mind of God from all eternity.  Today’s lesson from the Book of Proverbs expresses it as though in the words of our Lady herself, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.  I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.”

“When there were no depths, I was conceived.” This everlasting aspect of our Lady’s Immaculate Conception impresses upon us the tremendous weight and emphasis this singular event possesses.  It is an essential part of God’s plan of redemption.  No sooner had Adam and Eve committed their first, original sin, than God himself announced to Eve that the heel of her seed would crush the head of the serpent, defeating the Devil’s plan to bring about the total damnation of mankind.  Centuries later, at the very first instance of our Lady’s physical existence on this earth, this daughter of Eve immediately fulfilled her role, crushing Satan’s head beneath her feet by her exemption from the original sin with which the Evil One had tried to bring about man’s destruction. 

Little wonder then, that it is in our Lady that our greatest life lesson is to learned.  “Whoso findeth me,” she tells us, “findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord.”  So let us look to our heavenly Mother, let us hearken unto her and keep her ways, let us watch daily at her gates and wait the posts of her doors.  For she is the very gate of heaven itself, and if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on her who is full of grace, we will never wander far from the path to our common goal, the throne of her beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.