Advent invites us to enter into the Mystery of God. Today is the feast day of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A very wonderful and fantastic mystery to contemplate during the preparation for the arrival of the Word made flesh. If you are Catholic, this is one of the core beliefs of our religion. If you believe in the Immaculate Conception, you presumably automatically believe in several other things taught by the Catholic church.

If you believe in the Immaculate Conception, you believe that God exists. You believe in the Judeo-Christian concept of God that there is only one of Him and that he has always existed and has no beginning and no end.  He is not the supreme being but being itself. Another great mystery to ponder.

If you believe in the God that Catholics, Protestants and the Orthodox believe in you believe that although He one God, he consists of three separate but equal persons whom we call The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit who together form the Holy Trinity.

If you believe in the Trinity, you believe that the triune Godhead created the visible universe and the earth we live upon out of nothing, ex nihilo.  You would also believe that He also created the unseen world chock full of pure of non-material pure spiritual beings we refer to as angels.

If you believe that God created the angels, you also believe that He created a very specific individual angelic being named Lucifer or Satan.

If you believe that Satan is real, you also believe that he led a rebellion in the unseen world of heaven and that he led a Third of the angels into rejecting God for some particular reason that got them kicked out of heaven and had a new realm created just for him and the other fallen angels called hell. It is good to remember that Satan and the others were originally made perfect and only choose to turn away from God.

If you believe the story of the fall of the unseen world you would also believe in the fall of the seen world we live and move and have our being in. After leaving the magnificent beauty of the heavenly realm where God dwells Satan moved his mischief and bitter envy into the world in which God created material beings made in his image and likeness. It is in this world that God created man. And it is in this world that Satan tricked the first man and the first woman into separating themselves from God.

If you believe in the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, you believe that they were originally created perfectly like the angels and walked with the full knowledge of God alive in their hearts with no sin or rebellion anywhere in their being. After being tricked into eating the fruit in the garden of Eden of the Tree of Good and Evil, sin now entered the world.

If you believe that sin entered into the world through Adam and Eve you then believe that every person born after that was born with the tendency and inclination to sin and were now separated from God without their knowledge of Him alive in their souls.

If you believe in these stories you believe in the book that brought these stories to life in the soul of every person that believes in them, namely the bible.

If you believe in the bible as a Catholic or other Christian you believe that it is more than just a mere book, but “the word of God which is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, even penetrating as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” -Hebrews 4:12

If you believe the bible, you should also believe in the promise that God would send a savior, a messiah to restore the rift between heaven and earth.

If you believe in the promise of God, you believe that he fulfilled that promised by creating the Jewish faith through his covenant with Abraham and down the line through Noah, Moses, David and the prophets.

If you believe in the truth of the setup of the covenant you believe that the Jews eagerly awaited several millenniums for the promised savior and that God setup the Jewish faith to prepare a place for the Messiah to enter into our reality.

If you believe that God would send a savior, you believe that that savior was God himself.

If you believe that God is the savior, you believe that he had to come into world in which he could be a living part of it. Thus, he would become one of his own creatures he breathed life into. A descendent of Adam, Abraham and King David.

If you believe that God became human,

Pause

God the eternal persons who are existence itself sent one of its members to join the human race. When you really stop to ponder this, it can really stir one into the mystery advent invites us to enter. The eternal Word of God became flesh.

If you believe that God became human, you would also believe that God planned his arrival with all the details of how it would all work out. He came in the fullness of time when all the conditions of the world were just right for his entrance on the scene of history.

If you believe that God would become human, you would also believe that He would come through a woman as women give birth to human beings. Thus a human mother would give God his humanity.

If you believe that God would be born of a woman, you would also believe that it could not be an ordinary birth. It would have to be a human mother without a human father. Thus the mother to be would have to be a virgin.

If you believe that the second person of the Trinity was to be born of a virgin, you believe that that virgin’s name was Mary.  You also would believe that God would want a very special place to enter existence. He would not want a womb that had been corrupted with concupiscence, a darken mind and a weaken will. He would want a soul free from the pull and gravity of sin to accept the mission to bare the son of God. The pure divine spiritual second person of the Holy Trinity joined Himself to his created material world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

If you believe what the Catholic church teaches about who Jesus is, you believe that Mary is the Mother of God. The orthodox antient teaching about Christ states that He is one divine person. He is not a human person created in history but a divine person who always existed in eternity. That divine person joined his uncreated nature to a created human nature.

Thus, Jesus is one divine person with two natures. One that is 100% God and one that is 100% human. The joining of these two natures occurs in one person who is of divine and not human origin. We call this the Hypostatic Union. Mary is the mother of a person not a nature. She was given the title of Mother of God, Theotokos, to assert the divinity of Christ and not to just give her a fancy title.

If you believe that God would want his mission to succeed without incident, you can believe in the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.

A fiction as fantastic and wild
A mother made by her own child
The hopeless babe who cried
“Was God Incarnate and man deified?”

That is the mystery
More than you can see
Give up on your pondering
And fall down on your knees
-Michael Card, To the Mystery

Mary was born in the usual way, her parents St. Joachim and Anne had normal marital relations and Anne got pregnant with Mary.

God’s son, whom Mary and her husband Joseph named Jesus redeemed the world through his death and resurrection. The merits of his sacrificial offering to God the father he applied to Mary before his act of love on Calvery. God is not bound by time so he can do this. He created Adam and Eve immaculate. He created the angels immaculate. When the merits of Christ enter our soul through baptism and we are purged of every inch of sin we commit during our life, we also become immaculate.

If you believe in the Immaculate Conception, you also believe in the authority of the church that Christ set up through St. Peter and his successors and that they have the power to interpret the tradition of that church and declare certain teachings as official Catholic dogma.

This teaching is the one we ponder this day on December 8 in the season of Advent. A teaching that helps us ponder the mystery of the incarnation of God in the womb of the sinless virgin Mary, the mother of God. It was he who made Mary, that prepared her to be the proper place for the arrival of the savior of mankind.