The Lord Is My Chef Daily Recipe for the Soul by Fr. Nicanor F. Lalog II
Friday, Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, 08 December 2023
Genesis 3:9-15, 20 ><}}}*> Ephesians 1:3-6, 11-12 ><}}}*> Luke 1:26-38
Until now, many Catholics still get wrong the meaning of the Immaculate Conception of Mary we celebrate today. Very often, they thought it is the Immaculate Conception of Jesus by Mary his Mother.
Wrong. The Immaculate Conception refers to St. Anne’s pregnancy of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to Ineffabilis Deus issued by Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1854 establishing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary that had long been held as a tradition in the Church, the Blessed Virgin “in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of sin.”
Unlike everyone of us stained by original sin, Mary in all eternity was spared from any sin by God himself so that she would be pure and clean to conceive and bear, and eventually gave birth to the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Count the months from December 8 to September 8 the birthday of Mary, you get exactly nine months and perhaps that gives you a clearer picture now of what the Immaculate Conception refers to. But, what should rely merit more of our attention in this great celebration happening also in this merry month of December is the great reality of how God works in wondrous and mysterious ways among us, asking for our cooperation for its realization.
Are we willing to be like the Blessed Virgin Mary to be God’s partner in bringing salvation in this world?
Maybe one of the sources of confusion on the Immaculate Conception is the fact that it is not found in the Scriptures. See how our gospel today actually speaks of the annunciation of the birth of Jesus Christ; however, from this we can also glean Mary’s Immaculate Conception by being referred twice by Luke as a virgin.
The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.”
Luke 1:26-28
It is very interesting to keep in mind that the two dogmas about the Blessed Virgin Mary – the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption issued 100 years later – speak of our beginning and end. In the Immaculate Conception, we are reminded of our original status of being pure and sinless until the fall of Adam and Eve we have heard in the first reading. The Assumption on the other hand, tells us of our destiny in the future, of “the resurrection of body and life everlasting”.
Originally before our fall, we have always been clean and sinless. Like Mary in her Immaculate Conception. See how Luke was very specific in using twice the term virgin or parthenos in Greek because at that time like ours, not all maidens were virgin.
Virginity here does not only speak of the physical sense but also of the deeper spiritual meaning of being clean and open to receive, to accept God in our hearts, in our being. A virgin is someone who is pure and clean of heart like in the Beatitude taught by Jesus Christ at his sermon on the mount, “Blessed are the clean of heart for they shall see God” (Mt. 5:8).
How sad that in our highly competitive and materialistic world, the value of virginity is laughed at or even frowned upon like a handicap or a shortcoming, clear sign of how far we have veered away from God and his teachings. Worst, we have limited our views of virginity and purity to the physical level, forgetting to shift to higher level of understanding and appreciation.
To have a clean or pure heart is to be like Jesus Christ, wholly united and obedient to the Father. Jesus himself proclaimed that everything he had said and done were not his but of the Father. That is the purity of the heart of Jesus, deeply one in the Father that he was the first to see God.
And that is also the kind of person our Blessed Mother is, the model disciple of Jesus her Son for having a heart one with his that on her Assumption she truly became the first to see God too!
Recall also how at the wedding feast in Cana, Mary showed us the example of having a clean heart, of “doing whatever he tells you” which she later proved at the foot of the Cross by standing there with Jesus until his death. That is why according to the meditation of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Risen Lord first appeared to his Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary because she was the first to believe in him totally.
On this Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, we are reminded that like her, we are all filled with grace from God in Jesus Christ. St. Paul beautifully expressed this in our second reading today.
Brothers and sisters: 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.
Ephesians 1:3-4
The grace of this Solemnity is the reality how God continues to work his wondrous deeds in this world among us, in us through his Son Jesus Christ. But, all his plans can only be realized when we his children are willing to cooperate with him, to be open like Mary to receive Jesus Christ.
Again, we do not have to take everything in the literal sense. God announces to us his coming every day not through the angel Gabriel but through those people around us, especially those we take for granted like the weak and marginalized, the children we do not take seriously because they are kids or the senior people especially the old and sick we find as burdensome.
Like Mary, we are all full of grace, the Lord is with us. Can we show him in our loving service to one another?
Let us pause on this day to go back to our roots in God, our origin and end in order to have that empty space for his Son Jesus Christ to come and work in us in healing us and our very sick world. Amen.
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