The Nativity of Mary

Glory of God Magnified in Her Birth is at Work in our Souls

On September 8, we celebrate the Birth of Mary. The Bible does not reveal any details about this hidden event. We know only that Mary is full of grace and that she already magnifies the Lord before the Birth of Christ. We also know that all grace comes through Christ and what He suffered for us on the Cross. These things that have been revealed lead us to hold firm that through Christ’s work of redemption, Mary was preserved from sin at the moment of her conception so that she was born without sin into a world of sin. Mary, preserved from sin, entered into the world hidden in the poverty of her people.

Her family was Levitical with relatives who served as priests in the temple, especially the husband of her cousin Elisabeth. Indeed, a pious tradition proposes that she was born and lived in Jerusalem. She would have entered the Temple as it was being rebuilt by Herod. She would have witnessed a new sense of the sacred growing among her fellow Jews. She would have been exposed to competing observances, customs and beliefs within Judaism: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots and the Herodians are mentioned in the Bible. Her family is not explicitly identified with any of these. She eventually moved out to settle in Galilee, far beyond the threshold of the temple, hidden leaven in the work-a-day world.

What does it mean to live beyond the temple, in the profane? Limited access the sacred is the normal lot of humanity before the coming of Christ. This not the way it was meant to be. Eden was a great temple, built by God as a sacred place where God and man could walk together, and where man might clearly see His providential blessing in everything. But, because of sin, we were sent from this aboriginal sacred place into the profane, the world outside the threshold of the temple. The Temples built by human hands in the Bible opened up the possibility for a people to know something, at least partially, of what man was originally meant to know. Yet, God was not content with these shadows. On this point, it is important to note that the Annunciation takes place beyond the Temple. The Temple, as wonderful as it was, was also covered in shadows and ambiguities. Herod rebuilt the Temple in an effort to usurp the role of the ancient Jewish kings as a way of establishing his own legitimacy. In other words, worship was for him a means to an end, and whenever religion is reduced to this by the politically and culturally powerful, it never realizes its rightful place in society. This historical challenge to true worship is the context for the Nativity of Mary and her life that comes to be in Nazareth.

So Mary would have pondered how things are not the way they ought to be, and she would have seen how her own people yearned to walk with God when His mystery was obscured by the rich, the powerful and the well fed. Her heart would have been pierced that those who she most loved lacked inner freedom before God, hiding in shame and burdened by false judgments. She would have learned through listening to the readings of the prophets about the promises and faithfulness of God. She also would have heard readings from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms how God is the One who searches for the human heart, how He continually offers men blessings of bread to strengthen him, and how He is with the lowly in ways they do not understand. From her earliest years, she would have pondered in her heart how the world needed a savior.

Mary was born into a world of difficult poverty and oppression, but she was born into it with a feminine freedom and presence that men had not known since Eden. If sin alienates, to affirm that she was born preserved from sin means that she would have been a source of communion for her family and for the people with whom she lived. She would have drawn and attracted them to all that is good, holy and true about humble humanity.No sin would have alienated her from others and not alienated from herself, her gentle encounters would have helped others discover the truth about themselves too. This would have drawn God Himself because she had His presence in her before even the incarnation. His presence, by its very nature, was constantly filling her with ever new fullnesses of grace, each new fullness more wonderful and mysterious than the last. She would have exercised the freedom such fullnesses of grace allow: welcoming the presence of God, welcoming the presence of everyone God entrusted to her, completely available to God and His desires without any self-occupation or inner struggle. This obedience of heart, love inclined eagerness to do the will of God, was just who she was because she was full of grace and therefore free to be herself, to give herself, to rise the the task of being the gift she was made to be.

Mary’s mere mention in the Bible helps us remember that the alienation caused by sin is not the last word about humanity. God has opted for humanity, taken up its cause and Mary’s birth, hidden from the eyes of the powerful, reveals the shape of this option. In the fullness of time, God sent His Word into our humanity - so that through this Word we might receive every spiritual blessing, every grace. Moreover, He chose to descend into our humanity in a human way - that is through the womb of a mother. He is a man born of woman and it is this woman’s nativity that we celebrate.

When we acknowledge with the angels that she is full of grace, we open the eyes of our hearts as to why Christ would choose her as His Mother. Who is she who permitted Him to come into a shattered world and re-establish the relation of peace and glory that we loss by sin? She is the one who constantly welcomes his grace. What is this grace but his sheer gift of self, a self-donation so perfect and wonderful that it could suffer our alienation, bear away our sin and bring us home. This is the power that flows from Him when we pierced Him on the Cross - His Mother was full of this gift and this very fullness prepared her to welcome Him into the world.

To be full of grace means that the Father contemplated His Son in Mary’s heart through the power of the Holy Spirit even before she conceived Him in her womb. This must be so for grace comes from Christ alone and the Word always comes in the power of the Holy Spirit - and the Father always gazes on His Spirit-filled Son. St. Irenaeus taught that the gaze of God communicates His life into creation, and that under this gaze all things come into being and live. This is why he teaches that the vision of God is the life of man. If God could communicate so much life into the creation of natural things, St. Irenaeus wondered what happens when a man is filled with the Holy Spirit to gaze on the Father in the Sonship of Christ - what happens when the heart is filled with grace?

Here, the Bible provides a glimpse: when Mary conceives the Word of the Father by the Holy Spirit, humanity is inducted into a whole new kind of life. Her act of faith “let it be done to me according to your word” allows her, who is already filled with grace, to be filled with even greater fullnesses of grace, the perfect grace of the Son of God who perfectly joins humanity and divinity in her womb. In that moment, her womb becomes more sacred than the temple in Jerusalem. If we speak of her as the tabernacle of the Lord, we are using mere shadows to describe a whole new living mystery, something created, not by man’s willing it, but by God. If it can be said that she magnified the Lord even since her own birth, even more in the moment of the Incarnation did she magnify the Trinity in a way that no experience of her life up to that point could compare even though all of her life was filled with grace. We wonder too little over how something so wonderfully new enters humanity because, filled with grace, she humbly and freely said “yes” to a wonder that she could not have remotely imagined.

It is significant that the birth of Mary is hidden from any historical record. It is significant that the Mary was born in a forgotten far-away corner rather than in the newly rebuilt temple. It is significant that she came to live in a place that no one believed any good could come from. It is precisely there, in a forgotten, over looked and undervalued place, that God would re-establish his presence with and in humanity in a completely new way. All of this is significant partly because it is a sign for the way God wishes to work in our lives too. He works in the heart in the same pattern that public revelation makes known. This means that always in those places in our lives that we deem “no good,” that we want to avoid and hide from, places of shame of spiritual poverty, God has chosen to dwell and begin His great work in us.