Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.
Unto whomst (as all the cool kiddies say on Twitter) else has the Lord ever said “Full of Grace”?
Unto which of the Angels or the Prophets, the Patriarchs, the Judges, unto which King or Queen, unto which Priest or Levite, has this ever been said?
Unto which of the women of Jerusalem did Solomon ever say this?
Unto which of the maidens dancing is this said in the Psalms?
No one gets this praise. No one at all, but she who is the Mother of God, conceived this day without sin.
But why? The teaching is that by a singular act of the Divine Mercy, Mary was given this grace before birth: not to know the stain of original sin. The “splendor of an entirely unique holiness” by which Mary is “enriched from the first instant of her conception” comes wholly from Christ: she is “redeemed, in a more exalted fashion, by reason of the merits of her Son”. (Catechism, 492.)
And where else do we hear that sort of language? Around baptism! Around our baptism.
What God has promised you and I in our baptism, he gave to Mary by mercy at her conception. What is so horrifying about this: to think that God would honor with all the graces she who was to be the mother of Grace himself? She who was to be the gateway of light would be filled with light for all her life. She who was to be the new Eve would have the grace given to the first Eve before her fall. She who was to be the star of morning before the Dawn of Justice would, in herself, show the reflected light of the advancing sun.
This makes perfect, clear, and charitable sense.
It’s not sensible to deny any of this – although Modernists get away with it by denying original sin outright. This is also not sensible: anyone who has met an Orthodox or Catholic Politician knows original sin is real. If you have the slightest inkling that Jesus is God, what honor would he not bestow on his mother?
But…
The Greek is κεχαριτωμένη kecharitōmenē
This word gets used one other time (in a different form) in the entire New Testament. It’s in our second reading today, Ephesians 1:6, and it’s not talking about Mary, but about all of us who are Baptised. And this is why it makes sense to honor Mary today as Full of Grace: the Grace of Baptism bestowed before birth by God’s mercy. It’s scriptural: what God says of us after Baptism, he says of Mary before there ever was a baptism!
In Ephesians, we are celebrated as the ones chosen by God – in the same way as Mary. We are the one made in Christ to be blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavens. We are given this favor freely: we are made full of grace. To deny this to Mary is to deny this to everyone. (Again the Modernists and Liberals would have no problem with that.)
Today we celebrate in foreshadow what we will hail in reality on Christmas. God become Man to bring Man to God in fullest union. God entering our world to change the very fabric of it to make it a pathway of life instead of death. And even here, at conception, the thing that kills us is destroyed.
This is the glory of the Church: that Mary, our mother, signifies in her soul and body the mystery of our very lives: redeemed, elevated, filled with Grace, and made to birth the Word of God for the joy of all the world. This is the secret doctrine of our faith, that Mary, our mother, knows in her person the fullness of the joy that each of us strives to inculcate by the Spirit. This is the light that burns brightest on our altars: that Mary, our mother in birthing God to the world has become the Tabernacle of life himself. Mary is the Tabernacle, the Temple. Mary replaces all that with her virginal womb.
This day we affirm the highest honor God bestows on all of us by celebrating the most singular person to receive that honor in the most singular way. What we received in Baptism, by the promise, Mary received at conception by Grace. Let us by her prayers become worthy of this gift that we, too, may intercede with her before the Throne of God for those in our lives.
Doxos 