Candor est lucis aeternae et speculum sine macula

“They flew away like so many sparrows; only there were more of them”. This sentence, from one of my favourite childhood books, still makes me chuckle. And I see no reason why a text for a sermon should not be modelled on a phrase taken from the adventures of Professor Branestawm and his friend Colonel Dedshott; you can find truth anywhere, if you are looking for it.

And today, in Advent, which is the season of the Mother of God, I want to talk about Mary; not because she is something different from us, something halfway between ourselves and God; but because, precisely, she is just like us, only more so.

Today some Christians are celebrating Mary’s Immaculate Conception. This is not the same as the Virgin Birth – that Jesus was born of Mary through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, not in the normal way, of Mary and Joseph – but the belief that the Mother of God was sinless from the very moment of her conception (that is, she did not inherit original sin as the rest of humankind does). Whether it is true or not (and how can we possibly know?) it is in my opinion a very beautiful belief and one that expresses not only the great power of God and the great holiness of his Christ, but also the value he places on humankind. Eadmer of Canterbury, defending the teaching, said: “It was fitting for the Mother of God to be sinless; God was certainly able to make her so; therefore he did.” Of course, the “therefore he did” is doubtful logic, if it’s logic at all, but I think this little sentence makes it quite clear that if the doctrine honours anyone, it is God, and Mary only by the way. And that should be the case with any teaching about Mary, and any veneration of her.

This belief is rather like the instinct, when a new little person comes into the world, to make things as good for them as possible. We redecorate the spare room to make a nursery, or if that’s beyond our means, we provide a new soft blanket or a furry toy. Maybe a better analogy is the advice given to pregnant women not to smoke or drink – not for the woman’s sake, but to honour this new person by making their first dwelling as worthy as possible.

It wouldn’t have mattered if Mary had had the occasional roll-up or dram. That is not unsuitable for the Mother of God. But for there to be any stain of sin – the theologians’ instinct said: no. And there was something correct about that instinct; because sin alone, and not smoking or drinking, is the ruin of humankind.

I know that many Christians of the reformed traditions are uncomfortable with too much talking about the Mother of God, and given the history of Mariology I do understand why. But, in fact, anyone who considers the birth of Christ to be the central event of history, the moment at which heaven and earth were united in an admirable exchange, should quite naturally want to “visit” her, as you might visit the place where someone you greatly admire was born, or lived. I’d love to see Copenhagen, where Kierkegaard was born and lived; to walk around the same streets as he walked, and remember the things he said about them. Copenhagen may well be a beautiful city, but that isn’t why I want to go there. If any of you have been to the Holy Land, you may well have been overawed by beauty of the landscape and the buildings, but that’s not why you went.

Don’t be put off or confused by the excesses that do, undoubtedly, take place with regard to Mary. Mary is not a mediator between ourselves and God: there is one mediator, Jesus Christ. Mary has not got special, semi-divine powers; she prays for us as do the other saints, and our dear ones who have gone to God before us. The point of Mary - like the point of everything – is Jesus Christ. It is not for nothing, I believe, that we have been told so little about her. Of course it is a human instinct to embellish and invent – there wouldn’t be any historical novels otherwise – but what we do know about Mary is all we need to know, and inventing other things does little other than diminish her.

So what do we know? What does the canonical scripture tell us about her? That she was married to a man of the house of David; that she conceived her son by miraculous means; that she was pronounced blessed – twice - because of him; that she suffered persecution because of him, and was told there was worse to come; that she did not understand what he said, but accepted it and pondered it; that she was there when he was crucified. And that she was to be found among the faithful after Pentecost.

That is all; and there is nothing there that does not point to her son; she was created by him and for him and nothing extraneous to him has been recorded of her.

If I could choose what people would say of me after my death, I can think of nothing better than that. “Nought be all else to me save that Thou art”. But how far it is from being the truth! And how far I am from even desiring it, if my actions, and even my words, are any witness.

Mary is, as Wordsworth put it, “our tainted nature’s solitary boast” not for fanciful or pious reasons about which, in fact, we know nothing at all. She is so because she is what we were created to be: so far as we know, she existed only to build up the Kingdom of God. She was like us; only more so.

Immaculate? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly the greatest of all creatures. Not in her actions, so far as we know. Not in her words, though the Magnificat is one of the most universally recited texts among Christians. But in her transparency, in her refusal to get in the way, her refusal to “be” anything on her own account. Her only purpose on earth was to be the channel of the Incarnation and in that sense – yes – the channel of our salvation.

Mary is a good companion for Advent, a time when we should be trying to focus our lives more sharply on the coming of Christ and his kingdom, at Christmas, at the end of the world, and at the end of our own life. We are preparing to ask Christ to descend to us, cast out our sin, and be born in us. There is no-one who knows more about that than the woman he chose to be his mother.

So let us pray: O God, who didst endue with singular grace the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Lord: Vouchsafe, we beseech thee, to hallow our bodies in purity, and our souls in humility and love; through the same our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.