At the Heart of the World Is a Promise
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception | Mount de Sales Academy Junior Ring Mass
The mystery that this evening’s liturgy of the Immaculate Conception celebrates and the conferral of your class rings are fundamentally about the same thing. I would like to reflect on their sameness, first, by making a claim and, second, by picking a fight. First, the claim: At the heart of the world is a promise.
Second, the fight: In the last part of the Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas asks an important, hypothetical question that all the great theologians of his day asked: Would God have become man if man had not sinned? Aquinas’s answer is No. Here is his reason, in his own words:
Since everywhere [ubique] in the Sacred Scripture the sin of the first man is assigned as the reason of the Incarnation, it is more in accordance with this to say that the work of the Incarnation was ordained by God as a remedy for sin; so that, had sin not existed, Incarnation would not have been.1
According to Aquinas, Scripture says that God became human to save us from sin. Therefore, if there was no sin, God would not have become human, for, in essence, he would have nothing to do.
Thomas Aquinas could have been the most intelligent person to have ever lived. He possessed a mind of unrivaled erudition and a photographic memory, and, in an era long before ready access to books, let alone Wikipedia, he had Scripture, the works of the Fathers, and the decrees of Church councils all committed to memory. It is hard for me to imagine, then, how he could rest his argument on the grounds that Scripture everywhere says God became human because of sin, when the passage we just read from the Letter to the Ephesians so clearly says otherwise. Let us listen again to Saint Paul’s words:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, as he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish. In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ.
Sorry, Thomas. Scripture tells us we were chosen and destined for adoption in Christ before the foundation of the world, and, last I checked, before the foundation of the world means before sin.
That brings us back to the claim I made at the beginning: At the heart of the world there is a promise. Woven within the fabric of the universe and placed at the center of history is the promise that God would unite himself intimately with the world and enter fully and personally into time. Because of the reality of our sin, he fulfilled his promise by coming as our savior, but it was always his plan to raise us up above and beyond our human nature to become sharers in his divine nature. Christ is the fulfillment of the promise that lies at the heart of the world.
Now, I cherish the opportunity to serve the Mount de Sales community, and, although I am but a young priest, I know better than to get on the bad side of nuns, so let me soften my bashing of Saint Thomas (a bit). Whether Aquinas was right or wrong doesn’t affect the central truth of my claim. To be fair, his position has more weight than I’m giving it for the sake of provoking a playful spar. And, in any case, he would be the first to say that you and I are created to enjoy eternal life with God; and yes, Sisters, I know that Aquinas teaches that God is man’s last end in Prima secundae question 1, article 8. (Please invite me back!) If we hadn’t sinned, Aquinas thinks God would have found some other way to get it done, but we both agree that his plan has always been to share his divine life with us.
Anyway, before I picked that fight, I started out by saying that the Immaculate Conception and your class rings are fundamentally about the same thing. What do I mean? I mean that both Mary, the one born without sin, and your rings, symbols of faithfulness, are signs of God’s fidelity to his promise, at the heart of the world, to become one with you and me.
When Gabriel appears suddenly in this young woman’s room, perhaps as young as 12 or 14 years old, he hails her full of grace. His salutation speaks of a quality in her that has no equal in any other. She is and has been since her conception without the slightest stain of sin. Throughout all of time and history, God had prepared the world in many and various ways to receive its savior. But now, in these last days, he has thoroughly saturated with his grace at the very level of her being the woman who would bring him into the world. Mary is the ultimate sign of God’s fidelity to his promise. In her, he has done what he promised to do. Mary is aware of this, too. After Gabriel leaves, she departs to visit her cousin Elizabeth and sings to her: God has remembered the promise he made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever! Mary, literally, embodies that promise and lives thereafter as the immaculate reminder of God’s unshakable fidelity to it.
Your rings, given to you when you are slightly older than Mary in the events just described, are, like her, signs of God’s fidelity to his promise. A ring’s circular shape reminds that God’s promise has neither a beginning nor an end. There was never a time it was not, and there will never be a time it will not be. Its gold color reflects how precious this promise is, worthy of being cherished above all others. Your school’s name surrounding the bezel urges you to attain the promise’s fulfillment by ascending the mountain, which is Christ, pursuing holiness throughout your life. The Miraculous Medal engraved on the inside encourages you with the hope that God has already fulfilled his promise in Mary by receiving her, soul and body, into heavenly joy and places you under her motherly protection to attain the same. Ever while wearing this ring, dear juniors, may you be reminded that God desires to fulfill his promise at the heart of the world in you, to become one with you.
Although (quick reality check) you are not without sin (none of us are), God desires to fulfill his promise in you in the same way he did for Mary, through her Yes to his will. Mary said Yes when Gabriel announced to her that she would bear the Messiah, but even before, throughout her entire life, she put herself always and everywhere at the full disposal of God’s will. By little acts of fidelity and love, you will say Yes to God every day, and he will bring to perfection the work he has already begun in you, what he has planned and promised from before the foundation of the world.
And you have on your side all those he has already perfected: Mary, the angels, the saints. Pray to them. Imitate their lives. Learn from their teaching (including Saint Thomas’s!). For all those in heaven shine like stars in the sky as reminders of God’s fidelity to the promise he has inscribed in the fabric of creation. If our fidelity meets his, then we, too, will join them.
Dear juniors, may God bless you in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.
Homily preached December 7, 2022 at Mount de Sales Academy for Girls.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III q. 1, a. 3, cor.