Mary, "Our Tainted Nature's Solitary Boast"

A women's-lib speaker began her speech  'With a question: “Where today if it would man be today if it were not for woman?" A disgruntled man at the back of the auditorium shouted out an unexpected answer to the question that was intended to be merely rhetorical: ^“He'd be back in the Garden Of Eden, eating strawberries!' (Anything but apples, hr figured.)

Did a woman cause all of society's problems? After all, it was Eve who committed the first sin, as Paul points out (see 1 Timothy 2:14). However, Paul also states that "sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin" (Rom 5:12). It was not that first sin, the sin of Eve, that caused our problems; it was the second sin, the sin of Adam, that contaminated the entire human race, including Eve herself. Paradoxically, the first sin was not the "original sin" (taken in its theological sense).

Eve's sin of disobedience downgraded her moral state. But in itself her sin did not infect her with a proclivity toward evil. Not so with Adam, whose sin did infect the entire human race, including Eve, with a tendency toward evil and with other weaknesses.

Eve incited Adam to sin without contaminating him, but Adam, by sinning, contaminated Eve. Though not the first sinner, he was the first human; he was thus the only person who by sin could contaminate all human beings—all his posterity—and deprive them  of the primordial innocence they were intended to enjoy in their creational state of noncontamination. Adam could say to Eve, "Your counsel caused me to sin," but Eve could say to Adam, "Your sin caused me to lose my primordial innocence."

Thus, there were two kinds of failure in these two initial acts of disobedience to God's will. But by two later acts of obedience, this double disobedience would be counteracted and Satan defeated, as prophesied. "I will put enmity you and the woman and between your offspring and hers," God told the serpent; "he will crush your head" (Gn 3:15).

Both acts of obedience occurred simultaneously, at the exact moment of the most extraordinary divine intervention in human history: the incarnation of God himself, an enfleshment of divinity in human form! One exalted act of obedience to the Father was carried out by the second Person of the Trinity. “The Word became flesh" (Jn 1:14) in order to save human beings. Only as the "new Adam" could he undergo the torturous redemptive act that was required to atone for the sins of Adam's human progeny (see Hebrews 2:14; Romans 3:25). By this, he recreated, as it were, a new kind of progeny: "As in Adam all die, in Christ all will be made alive" (1 Cor 15:22).

At that same moment of the Incarnation, the other great act of obedience was performed by Mary, the "new Eve": "Be it done to me" (Lk 1:38). For this role Mary had been kept of ”full of grace." She was the first sinless human being, kept sinless by God's preserving grace to counterpoint the sin of Eve, the first sinner. In contrast to Eve's seduction of the first Adam, Mary consented to cooperate directly with the new Adam; she birthed him into the very world he would redeem, while aware that he was the only human ever born for the specific mission of dying.

The Incarnation and the Redemption—Nazareth and Calvary—are the "book-ends" or parentheses that demarcate the salvific solution to the pandemic of Adam's sin. Mary was intimately involved in both. Her total acquiescence to God's plan which began at the time of his enfleshment in her womb culminated on Calvary. On the cross, Christ's obedience was expressed in his Passion, Mary's in her compassion as she "stood at the foot of the cross" (Jn 19:25). Just as Eve was co-active in the Fall without causing it, so the new Eve was co-active in the restoration (salvation) of humankind without causing it.

Moreover, Mary's joint activity with her Son was again demonstrated at Pentecost when his mystical body, the Church, was born. After all, a mother is always present at the birth of her offspring! Mary held a place of honor at that event (Acts 1:14). She therefore has a unique relationship with each and every one of us, actual or potential members of his now redeemed mystical body. Christ is the head of the body to which we have become joined, and God has extended Mary's relationship with her firstborn child to us, his spiritual siblings: "He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn” (Col 1:18).

At Pentecost Mary's role as the new Eve culminated in her role as the new mother of all mankind. While not causing redemption, Mary was called by God to act jointly with her Son in reversing the universal damage of Adam's sin; she did this primarily by giving him a physical body through which he could suffer the atoning redemption.

Paul explains this mystery: "He [God] has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death, to present you holy in his sight without blemish" (Col 1 :22). Mary's maternal relationship to her Savior-Son in his physical body was paralleled, by God's design, in a maternal relationship with all of us in his redeemed mystical body. Why? Because in some way we, the saved, are all in him, the Savior: "We are members of his (Eph 5:30), and "in him all things hold together" (Col 1: 17). This awesome and magnificent design of God for salvation history has lifted Mary to an utterly unique position among all humans.

This excerpt is from the book The Art of Loving God by John H. Hampsch, C.M.F., originally published by Servant Publications, 1995. This and other of Fr. Hampsch's books and audio/visual materials can be purchased from Claretian Teaching Ministry, 20610 Manhattan Pl, #120, Torrance, CA 90501-1863. Phone 1-310-782-6408.