Conceived by
the Power of the Holy Spirit in the Womb of the Virgin Mary and was made Man...
What
an honour and privilege! I am so grateful to you for calling me to preach Jesus
Christ. Could there ever be a great subject for discourse than Jesus Christ? He
is more than a subject. He is Person, the Second Person of the Most Holy
Trinity, whom I have known and loved all my life. He will not leave me and, and
I will not let him go – so fast and furious is our embrace.
Yesterday
you considered God the Creator, also known as the Father. From all eternity God
knows himself and that self-knowledge is so perfect that it generates the Son:
God expressing himself totally in the Son. The Son is God-as-he-knows-himself.
Now,
can you imagine? God is going to extend himself personally in his creation. So
he had prepared a mother for his Son in the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary
from the first moment of her existence – the Immaculate Conception, a sinless
woman. We believe that God was communicating with Mary from as early as she
could think, and she was always assenting to the divine inspirations. “Let what you will be done to me.”
Thirty-three years on her son Jesus would say exactly the same in Gethsemane.
Like Mother, like Son!
A
brief note on the virginity of Mary. Virginity was not merely the abstention
from sexual relations, but something biblical and theological. Biblical: Israel
had lost all its battles and was on her knees, now under Roman rule. The house
of David was in shambles. No help could be expected from other nations.
Israel’s only hope was divine intervention, i.e. God’s help. Mary’s virginity
was all this. Symbol of the uselessness of human help, her virginity stood for
the absence of human sustenance. Virginity meant the hunger for God’s direct
intervention and rescue. God did, indeed, intervene. Her virginity would bear
fruit. “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus”, who would restore the kingdom
of Israel that would liberate the whole
world. The Church is the new Israel.
The
young maiden conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the
personalised venue of the love between Father and Son. So the action of the
Holy Spirit was an act of love. There was no human male intervention for the
conception of Jesus. That was done by the Holy Spirit.
A
few words about Mary’s pregnancy.
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Jesus the Eternal Word
took flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by the power of the Holy
Spirit, after she consented to God’s plan announced by the Archangel Gabriel.
Reflecting on Mary’s pregnancy can teach us patience and the
attitude of joyful expectation. This attitude of joyful expectation should
accompany the pregnancy of every woman as we await the birth of her pre-born
child. Each child is made in the image and likeness of God no matter what
their handicaps or circumstances of conception. Every child deserves a chance
to be born and to continue to grow and develop outside the womb. Jesus
identifies with the pre-born since he himself was a pre-born child. Jesus
went through all the stages of development that we went through. He was a
tiny zygote, an embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent and an adult. At no
time did he become more human. He simply went through different stages of
human development as we all did. When Jesus was developing in the womb he was
not a potential person but a real person.
Mary also can identify with every pregnant mother in a difficult
pregnancy. She did not fully understand God’s plan, yet she trusted. True
devotion to Mary means imitating her virtues – her faith, her trust and her
willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of her son and others as she
stayed with Elizabeth for three months to help Elizabeth deliver John. When Mary visited Elizabeth John leapt for
joy within Elizabeth’s womb as he recognized Christ’s presence in Mary. Thus
we see John who was a fetus recognizing Christ who was a tiny embryo. This
should lead us to an even greater respect for the lives of pre-born children
and inspire us to work for their protection. Jesus says "Whatever you do
to the least of my brothers and sisters that you do to me" (Mt. 25, 40).
St. Joseph cared for Mary during her pregnancy. He is an example
for all men of the stewardship they are called to exercise. Men are called to
respect the wonder of procreation and to care for pregnant women emotionally,
materially and spiritually. During their pregnancies women become vulnerable
and should be able to rely on the support of their husbands and other men in
their life who should respect and assist women as the mystery of life unfolds
within them.
Mary appeared as a
pregnant woman to Blessed Juan Diego in Mexico in 1531. She identified
herself to be "the perpetual and perfect Virgin Mary, holy mother of the
true God through whom everything lives, the Creator and Master of heaven and earth”.
Mary showed love to a people who had just escaped from the diabolical Aztec
empire in which human sacrifices were offered to false gods. Pope John Paul
II proclaimed Our Lady of Guadalupe to be the Patroness of the Americas. She
is also recognized as the Patroness of the Unborn.
“For
when peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift
course was half-spent, your all powerful Word bounded from heaven’s royal
throne, a fierce warrior into the doomed land” (Book of Wisdom 18, 14-15).
The
greatest things are accomplished in silence.
It is in silence that the heart is quickened by love, and the free
will stirs to action. The silent forces are the strong forces. And the greatest event of all was the
descent of the Son of God from his throne on to this earth. It was the most
silent event because it came from the infinite remoteness beyond the noise of
any possible intrusion.
The
Son of God became man, - “the Word was made flesh” (Jn. 1) in the womb of an
unknown virgin. No one but the young virgin knew that Divinity had set up its
tent among men.
In this Child, God, having spoken
at sundry times through the prophets, chose to reveal to man the mysteries
hidden from all eternity. In this
Child the infinite made an advance into the finite, a personal intervention,
a divine transfusion by which we are transformed, elevated, redeemed; for whereas
we were blind, now we see. In this Child, God and man have a purchase on each
other. He breathed our air, felt our pain, hungered, thirsted, laboured and
loved, and by doing so gave our life meaning.
The Incarnation was a descent into
the temporal, into the material, into this world of births and generations,
into this world of buying and selling, this world of housing and education, to
this world of leisure and hard work, this world of unemployment and taxes.
The Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, took upon himself all this in
order to elevate and transfigure.
Therefore, our salvation does not consist in a flight or retreat from
this world; not a flight of the alone to the Alone; not an escape from our
fellowmen and our day to day burdens. It is an injustice to the Incarnation
to confine its effectiveness merely to internal graces. In every line of
progress, spiritual, intellectual and material, the Incarnation must be the
enabling leaven. And if that is so, it should be the rule and not the
exception to have saintly workers and peasants, saintly statesmen and judges,
merchants and soldier. All stages of life are graced, from childhood to
adolescence, from marriage to retirement, up to the last day of our life.
“All flesh shall see the salvation of our God” (Luke 6).
Wherever the Christ Child is
adored there is at least some sense of mystery. Ignore that birth, and the
road to power runs straight as a ruler to the death camps. Focus on that
birth, and the road to a healthy humanity cannot be missed. This Infant
touched off a revolution, a quiet prolonged thunder, from the recesses of the
cave of his birth, founding a kingdom that is known by unconditional love and
undiscriminating service. The centre of this dynamic process is the human
heart; and the source - the Son of God, born in the heart of every man and
woman.
He is not an ideal or abstraction, a gaunt
empty figure beyond description; but a person in whom is the fullness of the
Godhead, the most beautiful among men, victor over death and hell. Nothing
great he puts before us to achieve except to love him, to be faithful to him
and to give faithful testimony to him when the time comes. His desire is that
we love him, that we love one another for him and that we believe in his love
for us. Jesus dying lives, and living he dies daily like the grain of wheat
or else he takes no root in our hearts. He comes into this world, dispossessed
infinity, naked and cold, that each one of us may give him something: the
universe for his stable, for his manger our hearts, and their warmth. And as
for the rest, we have no right to expect a status higher than that of the
carpenter’s son.
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