God gave us life through the great chain of being described both by science and by Genesis. This chain started with one cell organisms and moved through multicellular organisms to plants, reptiles then mammals climaxing in the human family. God gave us life so he could give us HIS LIFE. If the supposed 4.6 billion year history of the earth is crammed into a single day, the whole of recorded history is compressed into one fifth of the second before midnight, a blink of an eyelid. In that blink we have the emergence of the soul and human sin. In the same blink we have the emergence of a soul perfectly open to God, the Blessed Virgin Mary instrument of our adoption and glorification as God’s children.
God gave us life through the great chain of being described by both science and Genesis. This chain started with one cell organisms and moved through multicellular organisms to plants, reptiles then mammals climaxing in the human family.
God gave us life so he could give us HIS LIFE. It is a difficult question to answer, exactly when the human soul first emerged, exactly when a human being first welcomed, worshipped and sinned against God.
If the supposed 4.6 billion year history of the earth is crammed into a single day, the whole of recorded history is compressed into one fifth of the second before midnight, a blink of an eyelid.
In that blink we have the emergence of the soul and human sin.
In the same blink we have the emergence of a soul perfectly open to God.
‘When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman… so that we might receive adoption as children’. (Galatians 4v4)
The process of creation, the evolution of the human race, led to the woman ‘fairest of that race’ whose soul opened to welcome the life of God and its consequences so that ‘we might receive adoption as children of God’.
Through Mary the Son of God became the Son of Man so children of men could become children of God.
‘Happy the womb that bore you’ a woman said to Jesus. God in Christ came into the soul and body of the Blessed Virgin forever. It was a new creation as important as the first. God, who made all out of nothing, who set up and steers the chain of evolution, went deeper with the world.
Having established by his grace perfect obedience in a human heart he entered the depths of that heart and opened up a new chain of being that we’re part of, the communion of saints.
In Christian tradition we look backwards to Eve. We look forwards to Mary. The greeting of Gabriel, Hail, in Latin Ave can be written backwards, Eva, Eve. Mary is the new Eve as Christ is the new Adam. The great Anglican hymn writer Bishop Ken’s hymn speaks of this:
‘As Eve, when she her fontal sin reviewed,/ wept for herself and all she should include,
Blest Mary, with man’s Saviour in embrace,/Joyed for herself and for all human race’.
Then speaking of today of Mary’s heavenly birthday the hymn goes on:
‘Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced,/Near to his throne her Son his Mother placed; And here below, now she’s of heaven possest,/All generations are to call her blest’.
We see the exaltation of Mary as Ark of the covenant in our scripture readings. It’s an exaltation to be the lot of all who welcome Our Lord as she did. Mary is first redeemed and first fruits of the harvest of souls God planned when he made the world and re-made it through her.
We came to this day through the animation of the material world, the evolutionary process from cells to plants and animals to monkeys to ‘homo sapiens’.
We can head from this day towards the fulfilment of the new creation beyond this world in heaven for God who gave us life has given us his life which is immortal.
That life first planted in Mary is open to all who’ll direct their attention away from self-indulgence and self-centredness to let Jesus make them members of his family of redeemed humans we call the church.
We were made, however that may be, in God’s image. We are destined, however that might be, for God’s glory. The ‘how’ of our creation is beyond us. Not so the ‘how’ of our redemption.
Just as Mary cooperated with God, so must we. This is the only way for human nature to flourish as it’s meant to.
Salvation is human flourishing in this world and the next. It’s communal, being one with the church in this world and the next.
God gave us Jesus through Mary and with Mary he gave us a new destiny that we need to choose and own.
‘It’s not what you have been or what you are that God looks at with his merciful love but what you would be’. So wrote the author of the medieval book, The Cloud of Unknowing.
God lifts those who’ll let him lift them – like Mary herself, those with a heart for God’s future
