The Feast of the Immaculate Conception celebrates the miraculous conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary, right?
Wrong. Dead wrong.
In fact, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, on December 8 of every year, celebrates the miraculous conception of Mary in the womb of her mother, whose name has come down to us as Anna, as a result of the perfectly natural combining of the seed of Anna and that of her father, whose name has come down to us as Joachim (which my son Joshua assures me is correctly pronounced "Wah-KEEM," not "Joe-AH-kim," something which I won't agree with until he agrees with me on a debated point in astronomy). (Some Catholics and Orthodox Christians like to also imagine that Mary was conceived without the perfectly natural sexual desire, grunting, groaning and sweat of really good sex, but it seems to me that the exact opposite should be true, theologically. If Mary was well-conceived, then the marital bed of her parents was a very wonderful place -- because marital sex is ordained by God to be wonderful -- and a fun place, because marital sex is ordained by God to be fun, not a polite, robotic exercise in inconvenient physical activity by grim people who would rather be somewhere else praying.)
But, if the conception of Mary, unlike that of Jesus, was the result of the perfectly-natural marital act of Mary's parents, just like the conception of you and me, why do we say that it was "miraculous"?
Simple (or not-so-simple, depending on one's perspective): Something happened in Anna's womb which was overtly invisible. At the moment that Joachim's sperm and Anna's ovum joyously zinged together in Anna's Fallopian Tubes after a really neat, really wild, very satisfying sexual encounter, for the first time in the history of our species, since our hominid ancestors were ensouled by the ruwach or breath of God, the resulting zygote, or fertilized egg, comprising "Mary daughter of Joachim" was not "innately damnable" -- not stained with the stain of Original Sin -- and, more importantly, neither were the resulting ova in Mary's ovaries, and the womb and body that would hold a fertilized ovum, so that perfect God could later touch Mary's physical reality at the time of Jesus' conception.
To understand what that means, we have to understand "Original Sin."
That is what the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is about -- Original Sin, and Mary being free of it.
And here we crash into a problem. I'll be exaggerating somewhat to get to the point fast, here.
Most devout Christians still think that Original Sin was an event in history -- that it was something very bad, probably having to do with sex, that two perfect, naked people without belly buttons did while they were living in a perfect place in which mosquitoes did not bite them, which a really nasty God responded to by yanking them out of their perfect place and ironically converting them and their 100-billion-or-so lineal descendants into sin-loving dissolutes deserving nothing but Hell fire, so that God, having shot His Own creative efforts in the foot this way, had to engage in emergency saving action by having His Own beloved Son tortured and then murdered horribly.
Everything about that exaggerated-and-therefore-easier-to-comprehend restatement of the Original Sin teaching is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. And that is why so few people understand anything about Original Sin or about Mary's Immaculate Conception.
Before I start discussing what is wrong with that common understanding of Original Sin set forth above, let me attempt to portray, here, what Original Sin actually is.
God is "ineffable." That means that our minds can't get from here, where we are, to "up there," where God is. That makes sense. That is why, contrary to any mistaken impression you may have gotten from Aquinas, God can not be "deduced" with mathematical 1+1=2 - style certainty, so that He has to be "induced" with imperfect, possibly-incorrect reasoning. (Aquinas' own conclusions comprise exceptions to his own logical process -- for example, if order makes it necessary that there be an "orderer," then because order is in-and-of God, He too must have an "orderer," except that He doesn't! That problem, which is innate to each of Aquinas' "proofs" of God, generates good doubts about our ability to "prove" God.)
Because God is "ineffable," we can't quite mentally encompass the perfections of God -- God's perfect Sovereignty, God's perfect Goodness, and God's perfect Justice.
The best way to understand those three things is to view them as "things that are wildly true about God."
It is wildly true that God is "sovereign" -- meaning, He, our One God somehow eternally comprised of three divine Persons, is The Boss in all conceivable ways.
Because He, The Boss, was also overflowing with love, He decided to create us, to love and be loved by Him.
But because He is barred, by His Own sovereignty, from creating co-equal competitor Gods, it was "against God-ness" for us to be God's equal. We are required, by "God-ness," to be less than God.
This status creates what Middle Ages theologians referred to as "the contingency problem." We are not self-causing; we are reliant on God for our continued existence. To put it differently, we who are terrified of destruction and death are reliant on One Who is "not us" to keep us in existence. This causes an insecurity and panic in our beings which we try to fix by making our own rules -- by sin.
So, we are "sin machines."
The problem is profound. It isn't just "bad potential" -- a "probability" that we will sin.
It means that, without grace, we will make "the bad decision" every single time when we are confronted with moral choices. It is hard for us to see this and to believe it, because we have grace affecting us, right now.
This is what Jeremiah 17:9 means (in the King James translation set forth here) when it describes the heart of Man as "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."
The world seems bad now, but it's actually very good compared to what it would be without grace. Without grace, we humans would be living in Bedlam.
Without grace, we humans would literally be living in a Hell on Earth.
Soooooooooooooo, because this is what Ungraced Man is like, and because this is what Graced Man is like whenever one of us makes the decision to set aside grace and lick the Lollipop of Life, God, who is perfectly Good, won't touch us.
Now, when He created us, perfectly Sovereign God was fully aware that necessarily-lesser created Man would have this problem innately, in his flesh, and that this made us untouchable and innately unlovable as far as God was concerned.
So, even before our creation God perfectly understood the need for grace. In other words, He was aware that the cake had to be baked with a special ingredient.
But then another problem arises from God being perfectly Just.
In a sense, the perfect Justice within God screams an objection to the prospect of giving Ungraced Man grace. "NO!" it yells. "NO GRACE FOR THESE DISGUSTING PIGS! GRACE WOULD BE 'PENNIES FROM HEAVEN'! A 'FREE LUNCH'! THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A 'FREE LUNCH'! SOMEONE HAS GOT TO PAY FOR THIS GRACE, WHICH AMOUNTS TO A FREE RIGHT TO SHAKE HANDS WITH PERFECT SOVEREIGN GOD!"
And at some point within the Divine Reality, the Person of Almighty God Whom we call "God's only beloved Son" raised-up His hand, and said, "I will! I'll pay the price for grace!"
And God the Father said, "I lovingly accept this loving gift of My beloved Son, and so I offer My Son up to suffer horribly to pay for grace."
And so even before we were created, God envisioned that grace paid for by the horrible torture and death of God's Own beloved Son was the final ingredient.
And that that same grace would make Mary the one chosen to be mother of God the Son immaculate, so that the perfection of God could touch her, join to her flesh, and be carried by her to birth, so that he could be born, and then tortured horribly and murdered, to purchase grace for mankind from God's perfect Justice.
So, when Christ, on the cross gasped, "It is finished," and He died, what did He mean?
What was finished?
Answer: Our creation!
He had paid for, and supplied, the final ingredient, grace, which issued from the cross from that moment into the past, the present and the future.
So, "Original Sin" isn't "something very bad, probably having to do with sex, that two perfect, naked people without belly buttons did while they were living in a perfect place in which mosquitoes did not bite them, which a really nasty God responded to by yanking them out of their perfect place and ironically converting them and their 100-billion-or-so lineal descendants into sin-loving dissolutes deserving nothing but Hell fire, so that God, having shot His Own creative efforts in the foot this way, had to engage in emergency saving action by having His Own beloved Son tortured and then murdered horribly."
Instead, Original Sin is "the sinfulness within our flesh from our origins" -- innate to the flesh of Man who had to be less than and reliant upon perfectly Sovereign God -- so that we innately suffered from alienation from perfectly Good God, so that in His eyes we were innately "desperately wicked" and so unlovable, so that grace was necessary as a final ingredient.
So, what is all of that Adam-and-Eve stuff in the Bible?
It is a Dr.-Seuss-level fictional picture of the complex theological reality of Original Sin generated by God to explain the problem to us.
How many readers of this blog will go to their significant others after reading this, smile, and say, "WAIT TILL I EXPLAIN TO YOU WHAT 'ORIGINAL SIN' IS !!!" ?
Very few.
Instead you'll stick with that story about "something very bad, probably having to do with sex, that two perfect, naked people without belly buttons did while they were living in a perfect place in which mosquitoes did not bite them, which a really nasty God responded to by yanking them out of their perfect place and ironically converting them and their 100-billion-or-so lineal descendants into sin-loving dissolutes deserving nothing but Hell fire, so that God, having shot His Own creative efforts in the foot this way, had to engage in emergency saving action by having His Own beloved Son tortured and then murdered horribly."
The bottom line, here: The Feast of the Immaculate Conception celebrates the special grace of perfection so that Mary was somehow, by grace, preserved even from the risk of setting aside grace and so making herself loathsome to -- and untouchable by -- God, so that God could enter her, touch and join to the ovum from one of her ovaries that became Christ, fertilize it, and then implant in the wall of her uterus, where Mary carried it until Jesus was born in the normal wonderful gooey human fashion, so that He, supremely, was, at all moments in time, both God and also One of Us.
Okay. Time to press the "Publish" button and see if I get into trouble.
A lot of radical Mariologists won't like that "gooey" business.
No comments:
Post a Comment