In becoming man, God took to himself a human mother

First Reading: Num 6:22-27
Second Reading: Gal 4:4-7
Gospel Reading: Lk 2:16-21

On New Year’s Day, the Church honours Mary as the mother of God. Now what the Church “believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. What it teaches about Mary “illumines in turn its faith in Christ.”

Just one week earlier, the Church celebrates the Incarnation, or the “enfleshment,” of God the Son. The only son actually begotten by God the Father, “before all ages,” was made “incarnate” by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, thus becoming man.

(We too are sons and daughters of God the Father. However, we are not begotten by him, but rather adopted “in Christ.”)

Jesus is not part God and part man or a confused mixture of the divine and the human, the Church stresses. When God the Son took to himself the nature of man, he became truly man while remaining truly God.

Jesus Christ is one and the same person as God the Son. He is truly and fully God, consubstantial with the Father; he is truly and fully man, consubstantial with us, possessing a human body and a human soul.

After his Incarnation, God the Son “worked with human hands,” says Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes. “He thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart. He loved.” In fact, when he took on human nature, he became like us in everything except sin. He even took to himself a human mother.

The first hint of Mary’s singular role in salvation history came immediately after Adam and Eve’s fall, when God said to the serpent, Satan, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers.”

Many years later, God “sent forth his son born of a woman,” Mary, “a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David.” Through the angel Gabriel, God asked her to conceive, bear, and give birth to his son, and Mary consented.

Now for Mary to give “free assent” to her calling, she had to be “wholly borne,” or carried, “by God’s grace,” or “favour,” says the Catechism. In fact, God had already enriched her with the appropriate gifts. Like Eve in her original holiness, Mary had always been totally free from slavery to the pleasures of the senses, covetousness for earthly goods, and the desire for self-assertion.

On Dec. 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX solemnly proclaimed it as a dogma, to be believed as part of divine revelation. “From the first moment of her conception” in the womb of her mother, Anna, Mary was “preserved immune from all stain of original sin,” he said, by “a singular grace and privilege” of God and “the merits of Jesus Christ, saviour of the human race.”

The Church calls Mary’s conception “immaculate.” She does not mean that it bypassed normal sexual intercourse between Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna. She means that, by God’s intervention, it did not transmit original sin.

Mary was not incapable of sin. Like Eve in her original holiness, she had complete freedom to say “yes” to God in faith and love, or to say “no” in pride and scorn. Unlike Eve, she said “yes” throughout her life. She did not contract original sin when she was conceived and she never committed any personal sin thereafter.

“To her more grace was given than was necessary to conquer sin completely,” the Pope said. Just as God’s son has a father in heaven whom the angels praise continuously as “holy, holy, holy!” so he had a mother on earth who was never without “the splendour of holiness.”

Therein lies her claim to our devotion, says the Catechism: not so much because she is the mother of God, but because of her complete adherence to God the Father’s will, God the Son’s redemptive work, and God the Holy Spirit’s promptings.