Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Last Sunday the Gospel presented us with one of the great Advent symbols, the figure, the life, really, of John the Baptist. John's preaching was strong and insistent, almost strident in its urgency, and his prophecy gives Advent an urgent flavor. For John, the coming of the Lord was a thing for which one not only waits, but for which one must prepare as well. John saw the coming of the Lord as a time of judgment on humankind, and to prepare meant to repent, quickly and completely. As last Sunday's Gospel put it, in John's words, "The axe has already been laid to the root of the tree..." The destruction of the unrepentant, the spiritually sterile, has already begun.

But there is another Advent symbol, another life that gives quality and unique flavor to our Christian vocation to wait for the coming of the Lord. And that figure, of course, is Mary. She, more concretely than anyone, knew what it meant to wait for Christ. She waited with an intensity of expectation, and an intimacy that no other human being could possibly match. And so the quality of Mary's waiting differs vastly from that of John. Far from the disturbed, agitated, almost fearful expectation of John, Mary's wait was a quiet thing, a serene thing. She herself called no attention to the coming of the Lord. She made no ringing proclamations about the dawn of a new age. Her attention was turned inward. Her energy, her concern was for the shelter and nourishing of her child as He grew toward birth. For Mary, the coming of the Lord was not to be a time of judgment and distress, it was nothing to be feared. Rather it was to be a time of new hope, new beginning, new life, first for her baby, and through Him for all of humanity.

So Mary tempers, softens, with her example of waiting, the harshness and urgency of John. She gives to Advent a quality of joy and confidence. She makes of the season a call not only to repentance, but a call as well to a confident self-giving, a time of trusting acceptance that whatever form the coming of the Lord may take, whenever it happens, it will be good. And all we have to do to be found ready is to say "Yes" to whatever the Lord asks of us, as fully, as totally as we can.

Because that, I think, more than anything else that can be said about Mary underlines why she is the Mother of the Church. She said, "Yes". Not "Maybe", not "I'll try", not "OK, until it gets unpleasant", but simply, unhesitatingly, "Yes". God made demands of her. He asked her to disrupt her life, to do things she couldn't possibly understand, that couldn't possibly make sense, and her answer, the last line of today's Gospel models what the faith response of every believer must be... "I am the servant of the Lord. Let whatever You say be done."

And Mary's response revealed in human beings a new grace, a new ability, an ability that had been lost to us since our first refusal of God's goodness. Because of that refusal, Original Sin as it is traditionally called, there was lost to all of humankind the ability to easily and naturally make a total gift of self. The effects of Original Sin, born into every human being, are a kind of an inner split, an inner conflict between our awareness of God's design for our lives, and our own. A tendency, a readiness to make of our lives a self-serving thing. Our ability to believe, to say "Yes" to God, was crippled, we can do so only partially, only with reservation. Only Mary was ever preserved from that crippling division. Her response was total, no reservations, no conditions.

That is not to say that she was any freer from doubts, or temptations to self-centeredness than are we. But it does mean that by the special grace of the Immaculate Conception, she was made able to enjoy the grace of Christian Baptism, even before the birth of Christ. She was enabled by God to overcome those doubts and temptations, to act in spite of them, to act totally, unreservedly.

And so this doctrine, the grace we celebrate today, the Immaculate Conception, really places Mary firmly in the role not only of the Mother of Christ, but of the Mother of us all as well. The Word of God comes to each of us no less insistently than it came to Mary, no less demandingly. We too are asked to accept the values of Christ, to internalize them, to make them completely our own, with no reservation, no compromise. Mary was asked to do that very much in contradiction to the values and morals of her time. So are we. Mary was assured that she would be asked nothing beyond her ability to respond. So are we. Today's Gospel reading shows a very human picture of Mary. She had doubts, she had questions about the life she was being asked to lead, questions which were never really to be resolved for her. But she acted in spite of that. So must we.

So. Certainly with John the Baptist, Advent is Mary's season. Her voice is less harsh, less strident than that of John, but no less compelling. Her open, unconditional, confident acceptance of an unknown future, her readiness to be satisfied simply with the knowledge that that future would be guided by the presence of Christ, that surely is our Advent model as we too wait and prepare for His coming.

Readings: Genesis 3:9-15, 20; Ephesians 1:3-6, 11-12; Luke 1:26-38.