Far too often, we have a mistaken idea that “holiness” has to do with prayers, or some extraordinary kind of service or sacrifice. If that’s the case, most of us are in trouble!
What we can discover from this great Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary is that those who are “holy” are simply close to God, and everything that is good somehow flows out of that intimate relationship. Again, the truly holy, by God’s design, are those are close to Him.
Listen carefully at Mass today to Genesis 3, 9-15, 20. We hear there that the close and intimate relationship which those first created persons had with God was broken. Their infidelity left God with the need to begin what is, in time, a long search for a way to restore the holiness for which we were created. God’s restoration of grace took place through the new Eve, Our Lady.
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The woman we honor today, our Mother Mary, was holy. Her relationship with God made her so. She did not earn it by doing something. Her willingness to accept her calling is a consequence of her holiness in God’s eyes. She does not say, “Yes” and then earn her favor and holiness. It’s the other way around. Because she is already holy and chosen, she is willing to accept the unknown, the unimaginable, and what may have been a frightening request from the Angel of God.
Mary teaches us today what holiness looks like. She teaches us how a chosen people stand open to the sometimes strange and unexpected ways of God. She teaches us today what it means to be adopted into God’s family – we become a new people with what St. Paul calls a “new inheritance.”
As St. Paul also says, now that grace has been restored, we exist for one purpose: “for the praise of God’s glory.” And so we can say again and again: Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever!
