“Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”
These are Elizabeth’s words upon the occasion of Mary coming “with haste into the hill country of Judaea” to visit her aged cousin just after the Angel Gabriel announced that she who is “highly favoured” is to “conceive in [her] womb” and “give birth to a child who will be called holy, the Son of God.”
And yet, today we commemorate another conception, the conception of Mary herself. How paradoxical that we should commemorate an event which has no biblical basis whatsoever in the week of The Second Sunday in Advent, the Sunday that signals so strongly an Anglican sensibility about the centrality of the Scriptures as revelation, about the Anglican understanding of sola scriptura, we might say! How to reconcile that strong sensibility of the purpose and the defining force of the Scriptures with this non-biblical feast?
It signals to us, I think, that sola scriptura is to be understood creedally or doctrinally and not just in a positivistic or literalist fashion. The Scriptures are God’s word “written for our learning” and part of that learning has to do with our thinking upon the Word of God in all the fullness of its meaning. That means the Creeds, themselves an intellectual reflection upon the Scriptures without which it would be hard to say how the Scriptures are the Scriptures beyond dogmatic assertion and which provide us with a way to think the Scriptures without getting bogged down in a quagmire of contradictions. No. There is a deeper purpose and meaning to sola scriptura at least in some of its Anglican forms.
That deeper purpose and meaning has altogether to do with the priority of doctrine. Mary is absolutely critical to the meaning and understanding of God coming to us in “the Word made flesh.” There is no thinking upon the Incarnation without due regard to the role and place of Mary. She is “the Mother of God” as orthodox theology insists, “blessed among women,” as Elizabeth proclaims. And what is her blessedness? That she is “the handmaid of the Lord,” the one who says ‘yes’ to God, and whose ‘yes’ results in Christ’s conception and holy birth, He who is Lord and Saviour, both God and Man; “God of God,” to be sure, but man through her. He is the Lord with us because the Lord is with her.
What, then, about her conception? In a way, her “be it unto me according to thy word,” her ‘yes’ to God is but the realization in time of the whole purpose of her being, the realization in time of her divine and eternal conception, her being known in the mind of God. “Ere by the spheares time was created,” that is to say, before time and creation, “thou/ Wast in his minde, who is thy Sonne, and Brother,/ Whom thou conceiv’st, conceived” as John Donne puts in one of his most theologically brilliant and complex sonnets which provides a parade of paradoxes of relationship which go to the meaning and purpose of this feast, “yea thou art now/Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother…”[1] by virtue really of her very being!
There is the sense of the divine will and purpose with respect to human salvation of which Mary’s conception is an inescapable part. And so while there is no biblical story of her conception and birth and very little about her life in the Scriptures except, and the exception is important, in so far as her whole being relates to Christ, to God with us.
But Donne extends the range of theological reflection and deepens the parade of the paradoxes of relation. God, he argues, “yields himself to lye/ In prison, in thy wombe” an echo of the Te Deum, perhaps, “thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb.” The conjunction of womb and prison is striking. It goes to the paradoxical theme of cloister, a closed space, a spiritual prison, but one in which can be found the highest freedom just as we pray in the Morning Collect for Peace about our relation to God “whose service is perfect freedom.” Even more, Donne goes on to add that “though he there/ Can take no sinne, nor thou give, yet he will weare/ Taken from thence, flesh, which deaths force may trie.” And, suddenly, beyond the conception of Mary, we are introduced to another theme, the immaculate conception, the sinlessness of Mary as the condition for the sinlessness of Christ and for the understanding of human redemption.
For how can Christ be Saviour if he be not both God and Man, and how can he be Saviour unless he is free of the very thing that constrains and limits us from the moment of our conception and the hour of our birth, namely, original sin, the fons et origo of all our sins and follies? He must be like us in all respects save sin; sin which is the condition of our inhumanity, the untruth of our humanity, as it were. And so then the argument turns to Mary, to the chosen vessel of our Lord’s appearing and to the idea of God’s preparations for his own coming in the radical truth of our humanity. For Mary, to use Irenaeus’ poignant and potent phrase, is the pure womb which gives birth to that purity which Christ himself has made pure: “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” And by a kind of theological logic from the moment of her being – in God – and in time.
The feast of the conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is one of a sequence of feasts that follow closely upon the doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. Her conception, his conception at her Annunciation; her birth, his nativity at Christmas; her assumption or dormition, his resurrection and ascension (“that where he is we may be also” – the thinking is that must apply most completely to Mary); his presentation, her purification at Candlemas. The Lord cannot be with us and us with him without him being with her. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” She signals the vocation of our humanity by virtue of her relation to Christ.
The conception of Mary has been a feast in the Anglican calendar from the 16th century but not as a major feast and while there have been Anglican theologians who could think of her conception as immaculate – without sin – there is the sense of doctrinal restraint, an unwillingness to insist upon that which does not have the warrant of Scripture per se. It is not and cannot be an article of essential faith however much it belongs to orthodox reflection and piety.
We do well, I hope, to commemorate her conception, reminding ourselves at once of the preparations that God makes for his coming to us and reminding ourselves, too, of what belongs to the truth of our humanity considered in itself, in its purity and truth by which the Lord is with us. But, even more, we do well to attend to Mary in what she attends to first and foremost and above all else, the Word of God which defines her whole being by which “immensity [is] cloysterd in thy deare wombe” and comes to birth for our salvation. “Be it unto me according to thy Word,” she says, and, perhaps, just perhaps, because of the radical way in which that is realized we can say what Elizabeth says about her blessedness and ours through her.
“Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”
Fr. David Curry
Conception of the BVM
December 8th, 2014
[1] John Donne, The Complete English Poems, (Everyman’s Library, New York, 1991), La Corona, 2. Anuunciation.