Mary’s humility, renouncing motherhood by taking the vow of virginity, led God to give her the greatest privilege granted to a woman: to be the Mother of the Messiah, Jesus, the Son of God.
Newsdesk (25/03/2022 09:54, Gaudium Press) At first sight, the life of Our Lady was marked by absurdity, right from childhood: she wanted to remain entirely consecrated to God in the Temple, but had to return to the world; she promised the Lord to remain a virgin, but had to marry; although she was most holy, the Incarnation made her a terrible trial for St Joseph, whose unique holiness was second only to that of his Immaculate Spouse…
This path of paradoxical and paroxysmal trials, in which Mary walked among absurdities and inappropriateness, hid the incalculable predilection of God for a mission whose stature was not in proportion with the created, but only with the Creator.
In fact, the Divine Maternity consists in yet another paradox: God, although omnipotent, truly needed the Blessed Virgin. Not because of an absolute necessity, but because He wanted to, since it is part of the government of Providence to submit the realization of His plans to the acceptance of the creatures chosen to carry them out.
Therefore, God depended on Mary for our Lord Jesus Christ to be who he was!
What would have happened if our Lady had refused to do so? It is impossible to calculate. We can only conjecture: all of history would have been ruined, and nothing good would have occurred. From the barbarism that already prevailed, humanity would collapse in disintegration. From ingratitude to ingratitude towards the Creator, men would slide in ever more daring, deleterious and self-destructive revolts. And to this constantly accelerating ramp, we should add the growing indignation of God against humanity and the punishments that would follow…
The Fiat
Our Lady’s “fiat” occurred at the moment of the culminating bifurcation of history, when a decision was being made between millennia of misfortune and millennia of grace.
When St. Gabriel told her that our Lord was preparing, for many centuries to come, a period in which the Blood of his Divine Son would bear its most excellent fruits, Mary experienced great joy and consolation, and she obtained the strength she sought to give her answer.
It was revealed to her that, by the express wish of the Blessed Trinity, she would indeed reign over all men, which would give her the opportunity to offer to God the glory that her ardent and Immaculate Heart longed for.
However, in order to purchase – as Co-redemptrix and Universal Mediatrix – the new era of grace, She would need to carry alone the accumulated weight of several millennia of sins, ingratitude and infidelity, overcoming all the previous wickedness with the radiance of her immaculate sanctity.
Thus, remembering His promise, God would forgive man for his first disobedience and work out an unheard-of mystery of mercy, of which the Incarnation would constitute only the first chapter: the foundation of the Church, the institution of the Sacraments, the companionship of the Redeemer “unto the end of the world” (Mt 28:20), the immortality of His Mystical Body, the guarantee of a faithful clergy?
Without doubt, all these gifts were won by Christ on the Cross, but he only became incarnate because Mary faithfully contributed to the divine plan by suffering the unspeakable for our salvation. Only at the Last Judgment will we be able to have any idea of how much that promise of graces cost the Blessed Virgin?
Now, once bought, that future becomes irreversible. And it is impossible to measure its extent, for of all the marvels that God has dammed up in our Lady’s Heart, the most beautiful part is still to come. All that the Most High has promised, He will accomplish in Mary and through Mary. Let us trust and hope, because “no mind can conceive what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9).
Text taken, with adaptations, from the magazine Heralds of the Gospel n. 219, March 2020.
