Prior, Fr. Joel Macul, OSB - Celebrant
Genesis 3:9–15, 20
Ephesians 1:3–6, 11–12
Luke 1:26–38
You have to be steeped in mystery, in something beyond the everyday, beyond the flatness and dullness of everyday life, to grasp what we are celebrating today. You need to be a poet, a myth maker to envision the big picture that is placed before us on this feast. If you limit the story and Mary to the simply physical conception, you will be missing something. Or if you think that sin alone is the guiding theme, you will not be going far enough.
Mary finds herself in the center of mystery, the mystery of God who chooses who he wills and acts and speaks when he wills. How he does that, where he does that and with whom God interacts is and must be just beyond our human logic. But then our God is not bound by our logic or our will. From our point of view, his will is full or surprises.
Simply put Mary finds herself at the beginning. That is what we are remembering to day-beginning, conception. And our stories sweep us back to just beyond time to the garden to where it all began. And they bring that beginning forward to touch a young girl in Nazareth. Mary is bringing the beginning into the present ….There is something of a paradox here for us. We are in a season where we imagine our end, the end of the world, the cosmos. Where we speak of Christ coming to fulfill it all. And yet today we are almost thrown back to the beginning. Yet just this past Sunday, we also found ourselves at the beginning. We were back in the garden or the peaceable Kingdom where all was harmony, when there was no hurt, no enmity, no fear. And this vision, we are told, is what is coming. The beginning is echoed in what is to come. The end, what is coming, is profoundly linked to what was in the beginning.
If we look at the world around us or listen to the news, we slowly come to think that news can only be bad. The world is broken, human lives are shaped forever by suffering and death. Soon we are tempted to believe that is the way it is supposed to be. Today God comes along to remind us just what is the beginning of human life, of the human story. We hear the garden story about the serpent and the loss of obedience, the fracture of a relationship with God. True as that is, it is not the beginning of the story. The story begins not with sin but with grace. Today we hear that original sin is not so original; it is grace that is original.
When the angel breaks into Mary’s life, and artists and poets have done a good work in showing us what she might have been doing at that momentous arrival of a messenger from God, when the angel comes, he does not address the young woman by her name, Mary. The storyteller informs us of that. He addresses her with a new name, her original name. Hail, full of grace. That is Mary’s name. She has found favor with God, she is the chosen one, the one loved from the beginning. That is Mary’s identity—Grace, favor, loved one. She hears her real name. And hearing that name she can respond out of grace.
God identifies the endearing quality of humanity and his messenger dares to utter it: Grace, chosen, Favored, overshadowed. That is humanity at its origins. And that is where humanity is going. Surely a long journey ahead of us to believe and stand in that grace, that unconditional love of God. But that is who we are in our depths.
Mary stands at the beginning of letting humanity find itself again and walk to what is coming. The mystery that is before us is that God will restore us to bask in being touched by his love. In the core of her being Mary, full of grace, has found that point at which she is free of illusion and deception and has become poor enough in spirit that her spirit and God’s can converge. She has come to the immaculate, the pure within her and knows it as all from God. From there she speaks her yes.
In Mary’s yes, Paul tells us, it is possible for us to realize that we too are chosen, favored before the foundation of the world. Her yes becomes Christ. In him we, too, recover our beginnings, we too can know that it is grace that moves us, surrounds us and opens our eyes to see beyond sin, brokenness, and ever-present fear and look at love.
Once we realize that Mary has woken us up to the story of grace again, we can do nothing but be grateful and praise our God who surrounds us with graciousness and forgiveness. The beginning is not lost to us. Our roots are still there, given now in Christ. And with him we can complete the story and speak the poem that echoes in our hearts from before the foundation of the world. God’s story, God’s song that will never end: his grace, his love is without end. For that we were created.