As we continue through Advent, the Church each year presents for our spiritual strengthening a familiar set of individuals who had a great role in the plan of salvation. Each helps us to prepare for our own meeting with Jesus.

 

Among them we meet and reflect upon Isaiah and the magnificent prophecies that God inspired through him. “Comfort ye my people.” “A virgin shall be with child and they shall call Him Emmanuel.” What great hope he inspires in a tired and cynical world.

 

There is also John the Baptist. He drew people who willingly went into the wilderness to see him and listen. And there they found new direction and new purpose for their lives. His message was far different from the modern shallowness and self-adulation we hear so often. Rather, God inspired him to cry out, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” And with the public ministry of the Savior at hand he issued a deep call to conversion, reminding us of our need to “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight His paths.”

 

As we approach the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, Mary appropriately becomes the prominent focus of our thoughts and memories. With her, the fulfillment of God’s plan, the plan that involves each of us, began to take place.

 

We have already celebrated Mary’s Immaculate Conception during Advent. That expression of the Church’s faith is directly related to the Christmas season. As was noted in this column two weeks ago, Mary was given the unique gift of God that she be conceived without the wound of original sin. In this she was the new Eve, that is Eve before her sin and the fall of the human race.

 

We celebrate during Advent the whole story of Mary’s role in the Christmas miracle. And so, we read again the account of the Annunciation as if we are silent spectators in the corner of the room where that took place. 

 

We hear the words of Gabriel greeting Mary as “full of grace.” That grace is full not only from her conception, but it affirms that Mary has lived free from the personal rebellion of sin every day of 

her life. 

 

Such freedom from sin is not simply the description of someone who has avoided external actions of sin by continually turning away from the everyday temptations of life. Rather, it is a life whose holiness flows from a heart and a will that chooses God daily and hourly over any spiritual or worldly temptation to focus on oneself. That spiritual and lived focus on God is the task that each of us is called to.

 

Mary’s role also highlights the full meaning of the Christmas story. God began to remake the world after the fall of Adam and Eve. But in doing so, He chose to use human nature to restore human nature.

As St. Paul reminds us, “God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption.” (Gal 4: 4-5).

 

God used the humanity of Mary, kept sinless for this purpose, as the entry of His Son into the world in a fully human way. He continued by using the humanity of Jesus to be shared with us and then offered in death and glorified in the resurrection. And in every age God makes use of humanity in the work of the Church and the faithful to continue, among the human race, the teaching and sacraments that flowed from the One born at Christmas.

 

Mary as full of grace is also our model of the fullness of our human nature. As we prepare to focus on her motherhood in the stable in Bethlehem, we should thank God for the great gift of our mother. And we should resolve once more to live in holiness and full love for her son as she did.