Daily Mass Homily: Saturday, December 8th, 2012 (Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception)

            It is so good to see so many of you come to Mass this morning.  Whenever a Holy Day of Obligation falls on a Saturday or Monday many think Sunday will count for both.  You’re here because you know Mass isn’t just about fulfilling an obligation, any more than saying “I love you” to your spouse is a requirement of marriage.  You are here to worship God on this glorious feast.  We celebrate today the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and give honor to our nation’s patroness.

            If you were to summarize the Bible in ten words or less I would propose: “God loves us.  We sin.  God is faithful.”  And there are two words to spare!  This the story the Bible tells over and over again.  We hear from the beginning of this story in the opening chapters of Genesis.  God, out of His infinite love, created all that is out of nothing.  He created man and woman as the culmination of His work.  Adam and Eve then chose something other than God and sinned.  Yet that is not the end of the story.

            In the third chapter of Genesis we hear the proto-evangelion—the first Gospel.  It comes in 3:17 as God addresses the serpent—the evil one—as follows: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.”  Here God promises to remedy our sin by divorcing a woman from evil.

            That woman is Mary.  Where Eve, the mother of the living, chose something other than God after being deceived by Evil, Mary said yes after the message of the angel.  Mary, then, becomes the Mother of the new race of man.  She bears the new Adam, Jesus Christ.  She is the only one for whom an exception is made in the fact that “All men have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  She was “full of grace,” being freed from original sin which everyone else has inherited from our first parents. 

            We come to worship this morning, giving God great thanks and praise for the Mother of us all, the Mother of Jesus Christ and thus God Himself.  We pray that we may be strengthened to give our full yes to God and ask our nation’s patroness to pray for our country.