A Biblical Argument for the Immaculate Conception that No One is Expecting
This was included in the 3rd edition of Notes From the Field, but I wanted to included it here on my website for those who subscribed to the newsletter after it went out, since I think there will be interest in this little bonus piece of theology.
How can we know that Mary was preserved from original sin? The bible doesn’t explicitally tell us that she was. So how do we know that the Church isin’t wrong? I’m going to offer some basic theological points for your consideration and edification. But I want to start out with something entirely unique—my own theology(don’t laugh!).
I said in my first episode of “Myths & Mystery” that I was going to offer a theological point that may blow your mind. And this is it. After this point I’ll offer some more traditional and established theological points for you.
“Nothing will be impossible for God”
In Luke 1:37 we have an account of the annunciation that very likely came directly from the Blessed Mother, who we traditionally believe was interviewed by Luke when he was writing his gospel. In Chapter 1 the angel tells Mary that she will conceive and bear the Son of God. When the Blessed Mother asks how God will make this work, since she is a consecrated virgin, the angel tells her that the child will be conceived by the Holy Spirit, “for nothing will beimpossible for God” Don’t confuse that for “nothing IS impossible for God”.
We hear in other scriptures that nothing is impossible for God. (“But Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” Matt 19:26). But the angel’s phrasing in Luke is peculiar, "nothing will be impossible for God”. What I have always taken from this is that some things in this reality are impossible, until God acts on them in a very special way. To say that nothing “will be” impossible for God strongly implies a standout action that God will take at some future point in order to make this impossible thing happen.
Mission Impossible
The angel is promising two impossible things in the annunciation. First he tells a virgin that she will conceive and bear a son. Second the angel says that this son will save humanity from sin. We know why the first promise is impossible. But do you know why the second promise—to be the savior of the world—is also impossible? Because “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” must be perfect in order to be a worthy sacrifice to God for our sins. Jesus would have to be born outside of the order of sin (born without original sin) in order for his sacrifice on the cross to be a valid and worthy sacrifice for sin.
But that is impossible, because original sin always passes from parents to their offspring. It’s impossible, that is, until God acts, to make it possible. In this case God will have to act twice in order to fulfill these two promises the angel is talking about.
First God acts by incarnating Jesus in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit (“..he was conceive by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary”). But that still leaves us with a mother who might pass original sin to her son. And there we find the next act of God, which happens at the Crucifixion. It was this subsequent act that merited the special grace which God applied in the conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which preserved her from original sin, in preparation to conceive and bare the Son of God—the spotless Lamb of God who will take away the sin of the world.
Is your mind blown? ;-)