Most Fully Gifted
Immaculate Conception Scripture Readings
Today’s Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is perhaps the most misunderstood feast in our liturgical calendar. It doesn’t help that they’ve chosen Luke’s account of the Annunciation to read at this liturgy. Not that it’s irrelevant to this celebration. It has a critical role to play in our understanding. However, it creates an erroneous connection that has to be corrected constantly. The Immaculate Conception does not refer to Mary’s conceiving Jesus as a virgin. Yet, the term “Immaculate Conception” has crept into our popular culture as if it referred to parthenogenesis or the virgin birth. Even comedians use the term to mean a sexless pregnancy.
To be absolutely clear, the Immaculate Conception refers to Mary’s conception, not Jesus’s, and obviously, Mary was conceived through sexual intercourse, as were we all. To put it bluntly, the Immaculate Conception has nothing to do with sex at all.
So, why was this particular gospel, describing the Annunciation, chosen for today’s celebration? Believe it or not, it all comes down to one Greek word in the phrase, “Hail, full of grace.” “Full of grace” is κεχαριτωμενη (kecharitōmenē). Get out your grammar books, because this is the pluperfect passive participle of the word that means “to favor” or “to grace.” Grace, of course, means “gift.” So, κεχαριτωμενη (kecharitōmenē) means “gifted” (because it’s a passive participle), but by putting it in the pluperfect tense, the Greek has the sense of fully or completely gifted. And on that one term hangs the entire Immaculate Conception, because, if one is κεχαριτωμενη (kecharitōmenē), there’s no place for sin.
Sin is a refusal of one’s relationship with God and the power of God, or God’s Holy Spirit, which enables us to act outside of our natural bent toward selfish self-interest. Without that power—that grace—we’re trying to run the show on our own steam. We imagine that we are self-motivated and self-sufficient and therefore independent from God. In fact, when a person sins, they imagine themselves as their own higher power, their own God. Sin is always idolatry. A person who sins cannot be κεχαριτωμενη (kecharitōmenē)—fully gifted with the power and Spirit of God.
When the angel used that term to describe Mary, he was saying something profound about her. She had been able to be open to the grace of God and willing to surrender to it from the beginning. Her willingness to let go and let God unreservedly became the instrument by which she was able to become κεχαριτωμενη (kecharitōmenē)—filled with the Holy Spirit. The overshadowing foretold by the angel wasn’t something that was to come, to happen in the future. It was happening then, as it had been happening all along. It was only at that moment that she was made to understand that as κεχαριτωμενη (kecharitōmenē), she was conceiving the inconceivable, the Word made flesh.
We’re used to understanding the Immaculate Conception in terms of Mary being conceived without the original sin that infects us all. But, what is ”original sin” but that fatal flaw we all suffer from that convinces us that we have to go it alone as if God were untrustworthy and his love unreliable? All we’re saying in the Immaculate Conception is that, by the grace of God and her willingness to surrender to it, Mary never yielded to that temptation. She was κεχαριτωμενη (kecharitōmenē).
In light of this, we can offer our prayer with her to God saying, “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you. Help us to surrender to the gift of God’s Spirit as you did so that we, too, might be overshadowed and conceive the inconceivable. Help us to bring the savior to birth into our world by every thought, word, and action of ours, and may they all begin from grace and by grace be successfully concluded, through Christ our Lord, Amen.