God Has A Mom

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It is fitting that we should pause in our Lenten observance, these nine months before Christmas, and contemplate the joy of our Lord’s Annunciation. For it is God’s good and gracious will that those who are humbled and fatigued by the grief of penitence and who mourn deeply for their sins, might be consoled by the Word and promise of God whose Son, born of Mary, takes away the sins of the world.

The angel sent from God comforted Mary with these words: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.”

He promised more than a Son to the Virgin. In this, he also promised pardon to the guilty, redemption to the captives, and opening of the prison to them that are bound. He announced the Kingdom of the Son and in that Kingdom the glory of the righteous and the reward of faith. The Name Jesus – The Lord who saves – is the terror of Hell and the joy of Heaven.

“When all was still, and it was midnight, that almighty Word descended from the royal throne” to fill a tabernacle of virgin flesh with all the glory of the Godhead, the book “Wisdom of Solomon” says (18:14-15). He pulled everything human—body and soul, eyes, ears, and all our members—all this He pulled into God. “Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking the manhood into God,” (Athanasian Creed).

Therefore, God sucked His thumb and God dirtied His diaper; God learned His ABC’s and survived puberty; God ate and drank, sneezed and cried, walked and talked, lived and died.

And it all started when out of the nothingness of Mary’s womb – the Word who makes all things, made for Himself a body, human through and through. From the virgin soil of Eden the first man came, and from the virgin womb the last man came—came to re-genesis you. If you want something done right, do it yourself; so the Word who created men came Himself to make all men new as the Word-made-man. If it seemed like God was getting awfully close to people when He set up His tent smack-dab in the middle of Israel’s camp, how much closer He came when He shifted the Holy of Holies beneath the bulging belly of a young maiden from Galilee. Now that is Emmanuel—God-with-us, God-in-us, God-who-is-one-of-us.

And how did this happen? By what means did God become man? You may not be able to get blood out of a turnip or make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but if you are God, it is not a great ordeal. His daily occupation is making something out of nothing. From dead dirt He molds a living man. And from a piece of bone He builds a lovely bride. Ninety-year-old Sarah giggles when out of her desert womb sprouts a flowering Isaac. Aaron’s staff buds, out of fleece Gideon squeezes a bowlful of dew, and a boulder becomes a drinking fountain at which all Israel may slake their thirst. This is no divine magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat; this is simply God, all in a day’s work, always pulling everything out of nothing by means of His almighty Word. This is what the Word does – create life.

Who, then, does not rejoice, even in his afflictions and sorrow, to think that the Holy Spirit overshadowed our sister and gave us a Savior? David prays:

Remember your word to your servant, in which you have made me hope. This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life. Psalm 119:49–50 (ESV)

David had comfort in his afflictions. The promise gave him life. He had only received the word of promise because the Messiah had not yet been born. But in the certitude of his hope, grounded in faith that it was God who had made the promise, he was comforted and had joy. If, then, David was sustained in his mind with the bare hope of this salvation which was reserved for us, what joy, what delight should the manifestation of the thing itself cause to us! Who then does not rejoice? Only he who does not believe.

We live in the best of times. The Messiah has come and the Word of God is readily available to us. Is it not the best of times when there is such plenitude of grace and of all good things? Who has ever, in the history of men, received more of the pure doctrine than we? Do we dare to grumble because we have do not more luxuries or because Satan is arrayed against us?

The fullness of the time is come. God has sent forth His Son. He, the Son of Mary, God in our Flesh, is the Savior of all men.

But we also live in the worst of times, in the most decadent and depraved age that the world has ever known. Salvation is announced to the lost, and they despise it. Life is promised to the hopeless, and they neglect it. God comes to men, and they ignore Him. And those who have been handed the pure doctrine of grace, take it for granted and long for the cucumbers of Egypt.

In this present darkness, in this most depraved and pro-death age the world has seen, we have been given great gifts, but we prefer to shun them in favor of our own slop. God gives the gift of sex to be used according to His purposes, but your sinful flesh would like to do anything but that. Your eye wanders, your flesh lusts, your mind desires one who has not been given to you. And you desire that the results of that lust not be visited upon you. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, who are murdered by the ones commanded to protect and nurture them. And the world expects the godly and faithful to pay for it.

Today we celebrate what may be the strongest example of our Lord's desire for life. The Lord of the Universe was conceived in the womb of Mary. The Creator of all things was a zygote, an embryo – a blob of tissue invading a woman's body and threatening her autonomy. But everlasting thanks be to God that He did! For if He had not, if the Archangel had not spoken the Christ-conceiving Word of the Lord, our faith would be a lie, and we would be left in our sins. No, God is Man. God has a mother. And because He does, you have a heavenly Father.

Mary is greater than Sarah, promised son though Isaac was. Mary is greater than Samson’s mother, savior though he also was. In Mary’s womb and nursing at her breast is the Lord of all. So it had to be, for if Mary had given birth to one who was less than God, then more would have been needed. To put it simply: if Mary is not the mother of God, then God is not our Father. For He must, and He did, become like us in all things, and yet remain like His Father in all things, that in all things He might redeem us by His blood. Mary is the Mother of God so that God could become your brother, to bear your sins and die your death upon the cross.

Simultaneously virgin and mother—Mary is the icon of the virgin bride of Jesus who bears all her children in the image and likeness of her husband. She was the first to be in communion with the flesh and blood of Jesus. She is the preeminent receiver of the Word from the Father. Higher and more glorious than the cherubim and seraphim, this bearer of the eternal Word gives voice to the praise of all creation as she sings the most heavenly hymn ever uttered by an earthly tongue.

But Mary is not alone, for what she received, of Him you have partaken. The Word became flesh to make your flesh into Word. Into your sin-infested body is placed the body of the Word, the antidote for life, to make you new by union with Him. The Father wraps His Son in the swaddling clothes of bread and lays that bread from heaven into the manger of your mouth.

The rock whence Israel drank is pierced so that a lifeless corpse becomes an ever-flowing chalice that pours into you the liquid of life. Mary is the Mother of God, the Mother of the Lamb who was slain but now is living, for us men and for our salvation.

Who is it then that is gladdened by the word of the angel to Mary? Only he who has first been humbled by pious grief, grief for his wandering and his exile, grief for the chains of death and the perils of Hell, grief that mourns every day for violence and lies and immorality all about him and, most significantly, for his own part in it.

Happy for him, and only for him, is the angel’s message to Mary. For he, full of joy, receives the message of the Lord concerning His Son. While he weeps and laments that he is hindered and harassed with so many evils, that he has suffered and caused so much harm by his sins, he also hears with gladness of his Liberator: Jesus, Yahweh come to save. He rejoices in Him who takes away the sins of the world, who puts an end to misery, and who bestows endless blessedness on the miserable.

Blessed, then, are they that mourn, for they, and only they, shall be comforted. Blessed are those whose hearts have been humbled by pious grief, who repent, because they shall be gladdened by this good word: unto us a Savior is born. Blessed are you, because God has become Man, and a Man now sits and reigns on the throne of heaven. Blessed are you because you have not only a mother according to the flesh, but a mother Church who has given you the new birth in water and Spirit. Blessed are you, because the Lord has looked with favor upon you and it is to you according to His Word.

In the Name of Jesus. Amen.