Christmas, the New Creation (Part 2)

The twelve days of the Christmas Season have arrived at Epiphany. St. John Henry Newman’s reflections on looking to Mary as a “Second Eve,” making Christmas a celebration of the “New Creation” in Christ (see previous post), can help us slow down and not miss the significance of these seasons: Advent prepares us for the arrival of the King; the King arrives on Christmas, and for twelve days we marvel at His presence among us; and on Epiphany, the Wise Men, thought to be religious rulers and philosophers from gentile nations, arrive and pay homage to the true King. His light shines to all nations, Jew and Gentile. Jesus Christ, to whom every knee must bow (Phil. 2:10-11, Isaiah 45:23), has already begun his reign, hidden and shrouded in the obscurity and weakness of Bethlehem. But the wise see and know the hidden truth, the glory of an eternal king. In this way, the Magi share a key virtue with the shepherds, St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary: humility. The liturgical journey from Advent to Christmas to Epiphany requires humility if we are to grasp its hidden glory. Christ the King calls us to submit to his rule, but in a startling gesture invites us by grace to share his glory, to become members of his royal family, adopted sons and daughters who reign with him not as slaves but as sons (Gal. 4:7).

If humility is necessary for understanding and living in Christ’s New Creation, then it is likewise fitting to observe how the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of All Christians, persevered in God’s grace acting with the deepest humility. Mary’s exemplary discipleship is supremely simple: she made herself lowest of all, and God raised her to the highest glory in His Kingdom next to her own Divine Son. Her response to the archangel Gabriel reflects humble submission to her King: “I am the handmaid (Greek, doule, servant or slave) of the Lord…” (Luke 1:38). Humbly admitting her “lowliness” as the handmaid of the Almighty allowed God to do “great things” in her (Luke 1:46-49). She stands at the beginning of a New Creation that operates on what appears to be a paradox according to this world: in Christ’s own words, the first shall be last, the last shall be first (Matt. 20:16). Christ’s Kingdom conquers by self-sacrifice, is ruled by humility, and propagates by simple obedience to the will of God. This Kingdom, this New Creation, will be gloriously consummated as we follow Christ to the crucifixion and resurrection at Easter. But in the meantime, if we hope for glory, we must learn humility by following Mary as she follows our Lord

Mary’s perfect humility flows from the sheer grace given to her by God to be sinless for her entire existence, from the moment of her conception. Newman feels that those who disbelieve in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary do not understand it, so careful study is necessary. To say that Mary was immaculately conceived is to say that she was born without original sin. Some doubt the possibility of this, or worry that it makes Mary into a demi-goddess. But Newman reminds us that she was not the first to be born sinless: Adam and Eve were created without original sin, but this does not appear wildly impossible, nor does it tempt us to worship them.  “All we say is, that grace was given her from the first moment of her existence. We do not say that she did not owe her salvation to the death of her Son. Just the contrary, we say that she, of all mere children of Adam, is in the truest sense the fruit and the purchase of his Passion. He has done for her more than for anyone else. To others He gives grace and regeneration at a point in their earthly existence; to her from the very beginning.” In Christian theology, grace is ultimately the gift of sharing God’s divine life, in which sin can have no part. Progressively, God forgives us, cleanses us, and habituates us to a life of righteousness. Mary’s sinlessness implies an inward endowment, and one marked by plenitude: Mary is “full of grace” for her whole life, a fullness which all Christians are also offered by participation. The meaning is plain, according to Newman, as “soon as we resist the common Protestant assumption that grace is a mere external approbation or acceptance… whereas it is, as the Fathers teach, a real inward condition or superadded quality of soul.” To those who think that this makes Mary seem unrelatable or un-human, it is important to stress that it is sin, not sinlessness, that is inhuman and unnatural; sin goes against our God-created human design, and thus to be sinless is actually to be more fully human as God made us to be. Indeed, it appears to be a kind of false humility that would insist that to be fully human requires sinfulness. The message of the Gospel is that we can be restored, transformed, and made like Christ, presented “holy” and “blameless” to the Father (Col. 1:22). To deny the possibility of sinlessness by grace is to deny the very hope and promise of the Gospel.

Newman points out an important distinction that is often lacking in Protestant theology. “Original sin” is “a term denoting the imputation of Adam’s sin, or the state to which Adam’s sin reduces his children,” and which is cleansed by baptism (1 Peter 3:21). Original sin is the state of deprivation from the divine life of God that Adam and Eve had by grace (not by nature) before the Fall. Being deprived of this grace also had consequences for human nature, wounding it and inclining it to “actual sin,” or willfully committed sins. But Newman points out that Protestants often fail to distinguish between original and actual sin, as well as between grace and nature in the pre-fallen state, and imagine that original sin is a “positive” corruption of human nature, “a disease, a change of nature, a poison internally corrupting the soul.” Ignoring these distinctions led John Calvin and other Protestant reformers to think that the fall brought about “original depravity,” producing an “innate corruption” and an inherited “sin nature” (Institutes II.1.5-6). In reality, original sin is not a “positive corruption,” but is “the deprivation of that supernatural unmerited grace which Adam and Eve had on their creation,” which as a consequence wounds our nature made in God’s “image and likeness” (Gen. 1:27). “Original sin” is deprivation of the unmerited grace of an intimate sharing in God’s Divine Life, not an utterly evil infection of human nature.

This is a very important distinction because it means that the Blessed Virgin Mary, immaculately conceived, does not have a different or higher nature than ours. She is not a demi-goddess or super-woman. She is a human who, by God’s special privilege, enjoyed for her whole life the abundant grace of the divine life and maintained it by humility. It was “decreed” by God, applying the merits of Christ’s sacrifice to her in advance, “not that she should be cleansed from sin, but that she should, from the first moment of her being, be preserved from sin… she was a child of Adam and Eve as if they had never fallen…” St. Augustine sums up well what Newman found in the consensus of Christian teaching from antiquity: “All have sinned except the Holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom, for the honor of the Lord, I wish no question to be raised at all, when we are treating of sins” (de Nat. et Grat.). In this way, Mary represents and co-operates in bringing about the royal invitation of God to man: to be unified with Him, to intimately share in His life, power, rule, and love.

The New Creation of Christ’s eternal Kingdom begins with a truly Holy Family. This would already make Christmas wonderful enough, but the wonders multiply to consider that, in all humility, we are invited to be holy members of this holy family. There is now the possibility of intimate sharing between God and Man. Christ came among us “to be one of ourselves, with all the relations and qualities of humanity.” The Mother and Child we celebrate at Christmas present to us a “Holy Family, the home in which God lived,” the home in which we now too can live and belong. Newman reflects that the natural family is, “even humanly considered, a sacred thing; how much more the family bound together by supernatural ties, and, above all, that in which God dwelt with His Blessed Mother.” If by a special grace God prepared a sinless vessel for His All-Holy son to enter our world, we should not doubt that his immensity of grace can prepare each of us to be holy members of the great and Holy Family of God now and for eternity. Like Mary, let us humbly accept this precious gift of God, to become transformed members of His Holy Family, with Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the Saints and angels, forever and ever.

Quotes on Mary as the “Second Eve” are drawn from excerpts in Mary: The Second Eve, a collection of Newman’s writings by Sister Eileen Breen, F.M.A.