Genesis 3:9-15 & 20 Ephesians 1:3-6 & 11-12 Luke 1:26-38

Our most humane and healthy qualities are founded upon and balanced in an intelligent perception of and engagement with reality. Christians can have an appreciation of God’s life-giving goodness (which we call “Grace”), human evil (e.g., lies, gossip, greed, hatred, revenge, envy, etc., which we call “sin”), and natural evil (e.g., earthquakes, illness and mortality) which is somewhat different from non-Christians.  Today’s scripture lessons ask us to consider the superiority of God’s salvation over sinfulness by reflecting upon the earliest of the personalities of both the Old and New Testament narratives.  We also consider how it is that when we genuinely know and engage the messiness of good and evil we are often raised by God’s Grace to become ever more responsible and more moral beings.  We rise to the proverbial occasion when our intelligent religious faith works at our best!

Adam and Eve, the mythic ancestors of the entire human race, were created in the divine image and likeness by God the Wise and Generous.  Their lives of naive innocence were a mythic door through which the reality of moral evil entered into the ancient understanding of created reality.  The details in the Genesis narrative-myth of Adam and Eve easily distract us from the simple insight that we humans are fundamentally responsible for our own evil.  Adam’s and Eve’s story of sin, often entitled “The Fall,” was an ancient explanation for how the quest for knowledge and power made individuals responsible for their own actions and omissions, i.e., how power and knowledge make us moral or immoral.  Thoughtful Christians (and Jews and others of any healthy religious and even of healthy non-religious persuasion) are at our moral best when we embrace reality and engage life responsibly and wisely in terms of freedom, truth, justice, and love.  According to The Fall narrative, Adam and Eve were the ancestors of human virtue and sinfulness for each and every human in history.  They had reached out for the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17).  To the ancient mentality, that act of disobedient disregard of God’s prohibition against touching the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was the initial cause for all  sinfulness.  In the ancient patriarchal-monarchical culture, obedience was very often the chief of virtues.  Thus, disobedience was among the greatest of vices.  For us moderns, sin is generally more complex, less black and white, usually requiring great nuance.  From an intelligent, modern frame of reference, sin can be understood as an essentially necessary risk of engaging a very complex messy reality.  Whenever one decides to engage the messiness of real life, Grace and sin are both present.  To the extent that we try to make the best of an imperfect world, we are accepting and using divine Grace for the redemption of the world.  When we embrace the evil and destructive behaviors around us (by rationalizing that “Everyone was doing it,” or “All is fair in love and war”), then we reject God’s goodness and hug evil tightly to ourselves.  But, St. Paul articulated our hope in spite of sin, for “Where sin abounds, Grace abounds all the more” (Romans 5:20).

Mary’s fiat (Latin for “Let it be done!”) in Luke’s Gospel narrative is a Christian literary antidote to Adam’s and Eve’s Fall.  From the ancient biblical theological perspective, one individual’s acceptance of God’s Will was enough to make a profound difference in this world.  Mary’s acceptance of the commission by God’s messenger, “to conceive and bear a child and name him Jesus” (the very word “Jesus” means “God Saves!”) was her humble and courageous cooperative participation in God’s redemptive deed.  It  countered The Fall in the Adam and Eve narrative.  That she “had no relations with a man” was the early Church’s faith-filled assertion that she was miraculously outside of the chain of human sinfulness since Adam, that she was and remained sinless from the moment of her own conception in her own mother’s womb.  This belief was held so that Mary’s womb would be considered a worthy vessel in which to carry the infant Savior, himself one who “knew not sin” (Ephesians 2:1).  And, in nearly the same passage, it was God’s own hope that we (believers) would be “holy and without blemish before him” (in today’s 2nd reading).  Mary was indeed the great heroine of the Gospel narrative in that it was through her free cooperation with God that salvific redemption was able to enter this world of messy reality.  Since the apostolic Pentecost experience, the Gospel message which lead to our own baptisms has commissioned each of us to be Gospel heroes.  It is through us, in this divine hope, that we try our best to live lives which are “holy and without blemish.”  Adam and Eve thus, have become paradigms of healthy, if sinful, realism.  In fact, to live well, it is essential to risk encountering sin in the reality of a sinful world.  Just as Mary’s “Yes!” was brave, so has she become an example of courage to us modern believers.  We are to thoughtfully and wisely engage our own sinful and messy world, trusting in God’s Grace to build upon our sinful natures.  That we are willing to try does not insulate us from sin, but it makes us more willing and able to receive the Grace by which to morally and successfully wrestle with life.

Today’s feast is one nearly impossible to comprehend unless we accept that Mary’s sinlessness had an important and essential purpose: our inspiration.  Hers was not merely a status of sinlessness and, thus, of untouchable sanctity.  No, hers was the classic act of obedience (from the Latin ob audire i.e., “to hear from above” with profound attention and respect).  She listened so fully as to cooperate not only for the moment, but for a lifetime, and for an eternity.  Her “Yes!” has become a model for the whole Church through the ages.  The Spirit by which she conceived the Savior was none other than God’s Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom or Holy Wisdom.  Adam and Eve became “responsible” by the knowledge they gained in disobedience and so became obligated to be moral by a necessity of natural human sinfulness (Recall in the Exultet of the Great Vigil of Easter, “Oh, happy fault!  Oh, necessary sin of Adam!”).  Mary personified sanctity and virtue by simply accepting God’s fulness of Grace.

We must be thankful and ever-more appreciative of our human imperfection as spiritual heirs to the Adam and Eve narrative, for through this reality we also are saved permanently by God’s ever-present and never-failing Grace!  Our purpose in life is to live as examples of God’s Grace, always present!  Through that Grace, we are redeemed and our sins are forgiven!  Hail, Mary!  Full of Grace!