Our Lady gave us Jesus.
Mary stands at the wellspring of grace. Jesus Christ, God’s gift to man, the source of our life, is Mary’s gift also. Over and over in the incidents of the Gospel we are made to understand this law of love of the spiritual life: that Jesus gives Himself through Mary. Hardly had she conceived Him, than she hastened to carry Him to Elizabeth and John the Baptist; she presented Him to the Magi; she revealed Him at Cana. She shows Jesus everywhere. It is one of the most constant laws of grace. “They found the child with Mary His Mother” (Matt. 2:11).
God thought of us. He loved us. He chose and called us. But to what does He call us? To be His children. The incarnate Word is given to us as the model to be contemplated and reproduced: Whom He foreknew, He also predestinated to be made conformable to the image of His Son (Rom. 8:29). That is our supernatural vocation, to grow like Jesus. But, in the sight of God, Jesus and Mary are inseparable. One cannot be like Him, without being like her. The same eternal act which predestined Jesus to be our Saviour and model predestined Mary to be intimately united with Him in the whole mystery of redemption, and consequently to be, along with Him, the exemplar of our life.
When the Lord forms His elect, He considers them not only in His incarnate Word, but also in her who is worthy to be called mirror of justice, a pure reflection of His holiness: God wills us to become conformable to her image also. Besides, she herself takes pains to impress that image on our soul. She is the first agent of our redemption.
Our Lady has merited grace for us. Our predestination begins to be accomplished through Baptism, which by giving us grace makes us partakers of the intimate life of God. Baptism is our birth into the divine life. This grace has been merited for us by Mary. We must state clearly, first, that life comes to us from Jesus Christ, the one and only Saviour. If Providence had so decreed, the incarnate Word would have offered His sacrifice without the cooperation of any creature. But it pleased God to associate a Co-Redemptress with the Redeemer. “As in Adam all die,” says St. Paul, “so also in Christ all shall be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Eve, by her dissent to God’s instruction, had cooperated with the first man in our ruin: Mary, by her consent, cooperates with Christ in our salvation.
There is an admirable unity in the divine plan. We well know that the contribution of the new Eve adds nothing to the infinite riches of the sacrifice of the new Adam. Yet, in the Christian tradition, we love to recall that if Our Lord is the principal cause of our salvation, Our Lady is its secondary cause, and that the Mother has merited for us, congruously and through love, what the Son merited for us on strict grounds of justice. Their merit is of one order, since that of Mary depends entirely on that of Jesus. Both are universal – unlimited in the Co-Redemptress as in the Redeemer.
The Church understood this from the first. Saint Bonaventure merely sums up Christian tradition when he writes that: “One never finds Christ but with
and through Mary.” He adds: “Whoever seeks Christ apart from Mary seeks Him in vain.”
Mary’s mission is to give us Jesus. She does it always. “Jesus Christ is the fruit of devotion to Mary”, says St. Louis Mary Grignion de Montfort. It is certain that Jesus Christ, for each man individually who possesses Him, is as truly the fruit of Mary’s operation as He is for all men in general; so that if a Christian has Jesus Christ formed in his heart, he can boldly say: “Praise and thanks to Mary; what I have is her effort and her fruit, and but for her I should not have it.”
In each issue of Knight of the Immaculata we desire simply to show that Our Lady give birth and life to Jesus within us; that it is she who gives us the spirit of Jesus; who makes us know Him in His mysteries and in His sacrifices, and who impels us to imitate Him. Through her we fulfil our Christian vocation: we receive the “adoption of children of God through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:5).
Fr. Karl Stehlin
Warsaw, on the 21st of November,
the Feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
