1)
Our Lady is the first Christian believer. What
she has done is the meaning of Christian faith. The absence of sin in her made
her capable of saying “Yes” to the invitation to receive God in her, and to
give Him a complete humanity. All the humanity of Christ [soul, body, faculties
of intellect and will, etc.] are all from her. Not that she creates the soul of
Christ, but the egg from her and therefore all the DNA must have an organizing
principle reasoned to by the Greeks, and that must be present for the material
of the body to be body. The soul, however, is not the Person. The
soul is created; the Person is uncreated. The gift that she was asked to give
was her entire humanity. Any demurral in her faith would have meant a lack in
Christ’s humanity, which would have jeopardized a full redemption.
2)
Consider that Christ wants to be incarnated again - and over and over again – throughout history
in each one of us. If you make the same gift of yourself as she, and you
therefore become Ipse Christus, Creation has achieved the fullness of its
meaning.
3)
This act of faith is not ideological but
anthropological. Faith is not a book you can put in your pocket. It is a living
act of divinization whereby you become what you were meant to be: God as Son of
God, “another Christ.” Faith as obedience set the Jews apart as “the People of
God.” It creates a culture, a people. Sokolowski writes:
“The Jewish religious understanding was
centered on Yahweh, who was taken to be different from any of the gods
worshipped by other nations. The understanding, however, did not concern only
God; it also concerned God as having elected Israel and as having made a
Covenant with them, a Covenant that raised them to responsibility and
obligation and not just to privilege. The understanding was about God in his
actions, about the people toward whom he acts, and about the world as a setting
for these actions. In all this the Jews sharply distinguished themselves and
their God from other people and their gods; indeed, the myriad distinctions
enjoined by the Torah – between different kinds of animals and different kinds
of food, different periods of time, different forms of clothing and utensils –
may have been not just ceremonial rubrics or practices useful for preserving health
and public order; they may have served as a training for the Jews in the very
habit of seeing that this is not that, so that they would be all the more
able to realize that ‘they, the other nations, are not ‘us,’ because their ‘gods’
are not Yahweh…
NOW, “Within this Jewish tradition,
which had already distinguished itself so sharply from the others, another
distinction was drawn when Christ and his Church appeared. The new distinction,
between the New Covenant and the Old, was not like that between Israel and the
Gentiles. The God of the New Covenant is the same as that of the Old. The
Father whom Jesus addresses is not somehow the truth of which Yahweh is only
the shadow: the Father by whom and from whom Jesus was sent is Yahweh, And yet
a slight new distinction is drawn between the God who could not eer become part of this creation
– it would be degrading to hm and blasphemous to make him part of what he created
– and the God who became incarnate. It isnot just that we must now distinguish
between the Father and the Son, but that we must now distinguish a deeper sense
of the divinity, a deeper sense of the Godhead. It is not another and different
God, as Yahweh is other than and different from the ‘elohim, from Baal and Moloch and Zeus, but it is the same God
newly understood. No new proper name is revealed, but Yahweh is now called
Father in a distinctive way; he is called Father instead of being called Yahweh.
There is a change in the way the transcendence of God is understood. Not only
does God create the world and sustain it, not only does God act toward his
people, but he also enters into his creation, without diminishing his divinity.
He is so transcendent that even this will not compromise the God-head. The Old Covenant
educated Israel in the transcendence of God by preventing any embodiment of the
divinity, even any image of it. This pedagogy was necessary to distinguish Yahweh
from the gods of the Gentiles. But in Christ the New Covenant shows that God
could become incarnate, that he could humble himself and take on the form of
fallen man and become obedient even to death on the cross, and this humiliation,
rather than dishonoring the divine majesty, showed forth its glory in a way
that no other act of power could have done.[1]
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