We are all accustomed to celebrating the anniversary of our birth. The irony is that often the annual commemoration of one’s beginning is actually a reminder of one’s end. At a certain age birthday celebrations can move from anticipation to anxiety. We are reminded, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “in my beginning is my end.” Christians, however, mark our time with the life of Christ and his followers, and we rightfully commemorate not one’s beginning, but one’s end. In Christ, it is not how one begins that matters, but how one ends. In our end is our beginning. Virtually every feast on the liturgical calendar marks the day a saint has ended an earthly pilgrimage with heroic faith and virtue. We celebrate heavenly, not earthly, birthdays.
Other than our Lord, there are two exceptions to this: the births of the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist. In these cases, their births did matter because their beginning played a role in the coming of Jesus Christ. With her fiat, the Virgin Mary cooperated with the Holy Spirit to reverse the swing of death’s door. St. John the Baptist is the hinge between the Old and New covenants. As the forerunner to the Lord, John prepared the way for Christ by preaching repentance and by being the first to proclaim the advent of the Lamb of God. Their beginnings were instrumental in preparing the way for salvation.
Liturgically, the earthly births of the Mother of God and the forerunner have been commemorated from antiquity. The celebration of the Baptist’s Nativity corresponds to the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. Symbolically after the feast of his birth, the light starts its six-month wane as “he must decrease” to prepare for the increase of the Light of the World. But why stop the celebration at the saint’s birth? Would it not make more sense to begin the celebration at the true beginning, the moment of conception, as we do with Our Lord at the Annunciation?
Here we find that scriptural meditation on the beginnings of the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist illuminate our hopeful end. The grace that flows from the cross of Christ is the true forerunner for those who prepare the way for Christ’s advent.
At the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, while in the womb of his mother, the forerunner leapt at the sound of Mary’s voice. Theologically, how do we explain this? In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul declares that every response of faith must be preceded by a gift of grace from the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12.3). If John the Baptist, on his own (let alone in the womb), can respond with joy to the Lamb of God, does he even need a Savior? “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23) so he must have been aided by prevenient grace.
The same is even truer for the Virgin Mary. How do we explain the angelic greeting, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!” (Luke 1.28)? How can one be full of grace apart from the saving death of Jesus Christ on the Cross? These questions are important in shedding light on the tradition of celebrating not only the birth but the conception of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist.
While the conception of John the Baptist is no longer a feast in the West, the Orthodox commemorate it on September 23. In the hymn from that tradition known as the Kontakion, we hear, “The great and renowned Zechariah rejoices radiantly, and exults with his wife Elizabeth; for worthily does she conceive John the Baptist, whom the Archangel announced joyously, and men honor as an initiate of grace.” The pertinent phrase is “initiate of grace,” or one who has received grace.
The conception of the Virgin Mary is celebrated in the East and the West as unified breath of praise from both lungs of the Church. The feast has a long history in England, thanks to St. Anselm and Duns Scotus. The latter is credited with defending not only the commemoration of Mary’s conception, but that she was conceived immaculately, that is without the stain of original sin. Rather than declaring outright, the Church Fathers preferred to dance around any pronouncements regarding the sinfulness or sinlessness of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. St. Augustine wrote that all the holy people would rightfully say that “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). However, he refuses to include the Virgin Mary with them:
We must except the holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom I wish to raise no question when it touches the subject of sins, out of honor to the Lord; for from Him we know what abundance of grace for overcoming sin in every particular was conferred upon her who had the merit to conceive and bear Him who undoubtedly had no sin. (De natura et gratia 36/42)
John the Baptist, the Catholic Encyclopaedia suggests, was conceived with original sin but cleansed in the womb. He was, in the words of the Kontakion, an “initiate of grace.” The Virgin Mary’s conception, at least for some in the West, went further. To be the Mother of God, to be full of grace, her conception must be unique and free from the stain of original sin. This is the idea of the Immaculate Conception.
In the Anglican tradition, the conception of the Virgin Mary has been on the liturgical calendar of the Book of Common Prayer since 1561, even if the conception has not formally been qualified as “immaculate.” But as Colin Podmore rightfully observed, there must be something special about it. The English Prayer Book does not provide a collect for the feast, but the preface for Christmas in 1549 does have conception themes: “Because thou didst give Jesus Christ, thine only son, to be born as this day for us, who by the operation of the Holy Ghost, was made very man, of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother, and that without spot of sin to make us clean from all sin.” Podmore has argued that the reference “without spot of sin” is somewhat ambiguous and could refer to the Virgin Mary as well as Jesus Christ. He was made man of her substance, and that (her substance) was without spot of sin to make us (through the birth of her Son) clean from all sin.
Even in relatively recent revisions of the Prayer Book, the sinless conception of Mary can be argued. In the third collect for Christmas Day, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer keeps the same from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Here, we address Almighty God, “who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him and as this time to be born of a pure virgin.” What is meant by pure? Does it mean she was a virgin by every definition or that she was pure in the sense of being free from the stain of sin? Given the history of this prayer and the liturgical tradition, the latter interpretation seems more likely.
What’s at stake here is understanding how St. John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary could be full of grace, and therefore preserved from sin, before the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Again, for the Christian it is how one ends, and not begins, that matters. Without a nuanced understanding of these feasts, one could easily surmise that the sanctity of the Virgin Mary (and John the Baptist) is independent of the saving work of Christ.
Properly understood, the Immaculate Conception of Mary proclaims exactly the opposite. It is only because of the saving work of Christ on the cross that Mary has received prevenient grace that enabled her to say yes. It is only because of the saving work of Christ on the cross that John the Baptist was able to be moved by the Holy Spirit to leap at the dulcet tones of the Virgin Mary.
In his extraordinary work The Mystery of Christ (2006), Fr. John Behr introduces the reader to a challenging statement by St. Irenaeus of Lyons: “Since he who saves already existed, it was necessary that he who would be saved should come into existence, that the One who saves should not exist in vain.”
As an interpretation, Fr. Behr writes, “Now that Christ is with God, and all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him, there is no place or time where he cannot work.” In other words, the Savior of the world has always been. He was not created to remedy the problem of sin for humanity. He is not limited to a linear understanding of time. He is. Therefore, it is no issue at all for the redemptive work of Christ to work outside our experience of creation’s development. St. Anselm said the same in Cur Deus Homo regarding the Virgin Mary:
Moreover, the virgin, from whom that man was taken of whom we are speaking, was of the number of those who were cleansed from their sins before his birth, and he was born of her in her purity …. But as the mother’s purity, which he partakes, was only derived from him, he also was pure by and of himself.
Reflection and celebration of the conception and birth of the Virgin only makes sense if the focus is the saving work of Christ, which is free to reach forward and backward in our experience of time.
The Immaculate Conception may be, unironically, one of the more evangelical of doctrines. Its very existence is a proclamation of the need of every person for the grace of Jesus Christ and the role that grace necessarily plays before we can ever acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and submit our lives to his will and service. This is the position of the excellent ARCIC document Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ, that “we can affirm together that Christ’s redeeming work reached ‘back’ in Mary to the depths of her being, and to her earliest beginnings. This is not contrary to the teaching of Scripture, and can only be understood in the light of Scripture.”
Anglicans are not bogged down with requirements such as those outlined in Ineffabilis Deus (1854), which made the Immaculate Conception dogma. Indeed, in the recent Apostolic Letter by Pope Leo XIV, In Unitate Fidei, he makes this very point: “We must therefore leave behind theological controversies that have lost their raison d’être in order to develop a common understanding and even more, a common prayer to the Holy Spirit, so that he may gather us all together in one faith and one love.”
Understood rightly, everything we say about the Virgin Mary should say more about Jesus Christ. If we say she was preserved from sin, it is because of the work and mercy of Jesus Christ. If we say she was conceived without sin, it is not because she had no need of a Savior, but precisely because of the Savior, the Son she carried, bore, and held from the cradle to the cross.
Ye who own the faith of Jesus
Sing the wonders that were done,
When the love of God the Father
O’er our sin the victory won,
When he made the Virgin Mary
Mother of his only Son.
The Rev. Steve Rice is the rector of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, an Anglo-Catholic parish in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and is the founder of the Society of St. Joseph of Arimathea.
