Christmas, the New Creation

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. -2 Corinthians 5:17

At Christmas, we celebrate, of course, the coming of Christ our Savior. But no nativity scene is complete without his mother, who is called “Blessed” by all generations (Luke 1:48). St. John Henry Newman’s Christmas sermon, “The Mystery of Godliness” (1837) invites us to “mingle” our meditations on Christ with thoughts of Mary. Doing so will help us to realize that their special bond represents an invitation—to St. Joseph (as “foster-father” of the Son of God), the shepherds, the Magi, and all—to join their Holy Family, 

Mary received a privileged grace to be a “pure Virgin” and bear the Incarnate Son of God. We are assured by this prophetic “sign” of the Virgin birth that salvation has come and we can participate in the “mystery of godliness,” wherein we are made “partakers” of God’s “divine nature” (Isaiah 7:14, 2 Peter 1:4). United to Christ, the All-Holy God made man, we are made like him and can become what the Blessed Virgin Mary was privileged to enjoy for her entire existence: “full of grace” (Luke 1:26). Thomas à Kempis begins his Imitation of Christ by noting that we cannot know Christ unless we are like him. The mystery of Christmas includes the Virgin Mary’s exemplary likeness to Christ, by a special grace, that allowed her such intimacy with him as to be his mother (Latin, genetrix, giver of life). No one else can play this role, but in our own measure, we too are called to divine intimacy by sharing in the likeness of Christ as children, being redeemed and made “new creations” by his grace.

Newman’s 1837 Christmas sermon says that Mary, the holy vessel for God Incarnate, was indeed “pure.” But in an earlier sermon from 1832, “The Reverence Due to the Blessed Virgin Mary,” he states more explicitly that for the all-holy God to take up sinless humanity, it is fitting that his mother would be likewise free of sin. Whereas “other saints are but influenced or inspired by Christ, and made partakers of Him mystically… Christ derived His manhood from [Mary], and so had an especial unity of nature with her.” Such a unity of nature could not be if Mary retained sin—there could have been no human nature for him to properly take and remain sinless. She was, in the words of the (non-Catholic!) poet William Wordsworth, “Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” Writing over a decade before his Catholic conversion, Newman saw clearly the logic of Mary’s grace-filled holiness and its biblical foundations: “Who can estimate the holiness and perfection of her, who was chosen to be the Mother of Christ?” Overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, “chosen to be the only near earthly relative of the Son of God,” being his nurturer and teacher, the one chosen to “train and educate Him,” Mary enjoyed such a “sanctified state of that human nature of which God formed His sinless Son.” As the New Ark of the New Covenant of God’s incarnate presence among men, Mary indeed was prepared, by God’s grace, as a holy and immaculate vessel. That she is “full of grace” (Greek, kecharitomene, a past perfect participle suggesting a past and on-going state, Luke 1:26), refers not to an “external favor,” but is a real inward state by the “effect of the Holy Ghost within her soul.”

Newman would eventually find this teaching on the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary—that by a special prevenient grace, Mary was conceived without original sin—evident in the whole of Church teaching, from the Fathers of antiquity up through its formal definition in 1854 and to today. The Church Fathers, from St. Justin Martyr (d. 165 A.D.) to St. Augustine (d. 430), represent “the whole Christian world” through the 2nd to 6th centuries in describing Mary as the Second Eve and an immaculate vessel for the “All-Holy.” As St. Augustine wrote, “Death by Eve, life by Mary.” Mary’s unique role involves her pure, holy, and free choice to cooperate with God’s will. “Eve had a definite, essential position in the First Covenant,” entitled “Mother of all the living” by Adam (Genesis 3:20). Eve was a “real agent,” by an active choice, in the coming of sin and death. But there would be a “second Adam and a second Eve, and the new Eve was to be the mother of the new Adam,” prophesied in God’s curse upon the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). Mary, the new Eve, became the mother of all the reborn in Christ, the “real agent,” by her obedient choice, of the new Covenant in the order of redemption, crushing the serpent’s head by obedience to God.

Mary’s sinless cooperation with God’s will brought Christ the redeemer into the world, opening the gates of God’s New Creation to all of us. Living as adopted members of God’s Holy Family implies unity between God and man, the Sanctifier and the sanctified (Heb. 2:11). In Christ, we are caught up into the holy life of the Trinity, in which the Father eternally begets the Son. The Son condescended to appear as “the Son of God in a new and second sense, in a created nature, as well as in His eternal substance.” Yet the All-holy God cannot mingle with or partake of sin. He must come in a “suitable way,” taking up our nature “but not our sin… taking our nature in a way above nature.” Christ’s birth of the Virgin Mary is the “beginning of a new creation,” that has “no part in the old Adam.” To save us from our sins, Christ must be entirely without sin. In the astounding mercy of God, we now have a fellow man, a brother, who is God himself, to whom we come for forgiveness of sin, healing, sanctification, re-birth, and re-fashioning in his likeness (1 Peter 2:2). We can become, by participation with Christ, what Mary was from the very moment of her existence.

To say, then, that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the “Second Eve,” and Christ is the “Second Adam” (1 Cor 15:45) leads us to celebrate Christmas as the beginning of a “Second Creation,” something totally new and astounding in human history. Our whole human family was plunged into darkness and sin by the primal fall of our first parents. But a new, holy and divine Family begins at Christmas, and all men and women are invited to become “adopted” members of God’s family (Ephesians 1:4-5). Let us relish, this Christmas, our intimate and holy bond with Christ, his Mother, and all the Saints in the unity of the Father and the Holy Spirit. And let us pray for the grace and fervor to bring more souls into this great, holy, eternal Family of God.

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.