“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”
Either Paul didn’t know Mary was sinless, or this statement is simply untrue. Either way, Paul would have to be mistaken, which is hard to reconcile with him being an inspired, Spirit-guided writer.
The one exception to this passage is, of course, Jesus Christ, but that is because he IS God. Mary is not. There’s no Biblical way to justify her getting an exception no matter how special she was in God’s plan.
It appears that this thread has drifted to the topic of Immaculate Conception. Who am I to argue ? I’ll go with it and we can discuss this.
The theology behind the immaculate conception is very deep, and ultimately testifies to the fact that Jesus is God, God is holy. Too many people infer that the immaculate conception inherently implies that Mary was sinless and did not need a savior. This is simply not true. Let’s start by going over what the declaration of the immaculate conception actually says. The declaration on the immaculate conception says that Mary was born without the stain of origiinal sin, so that she would be fit to give birth to Christ. The Church declares that she was saved from original sin by a special grace of God that applied the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus passion to Mary specifically at the moment of her conception. The Church has always upheld that all humans (Mary included) are only saved through the passion of Christ. But since the sacrifice of Jesus is transcendent of time and space, it was applied to Mary to cleanse her of the original sin she would otherwise have been born with. This is consistent with the concept of holiness as had been revealed to the Jews, for God is so holy He can not be in the presence of sin. The Jewish priests who entered the sanctuary of the temple had to wear a rope on themselves in the case they entered God’s physical presence with sin on their conscience, because it would surely cause their death. Nothing unholy or imperfect can be in the physical presence of God, and Mary was to conceive by the Holy Spirit. Scripturally, this presents a real problem, because the Holy Spirit is God, and nothing imperfect can be in the physical presence of God. Biologically, Jesus’ blood flowed through Mary, and Mary’s blood flowed through Jesus. In order to be the sacrificial lamb, Jesus had to be “unblemished”. There is no way Jesus could have remained unblemished if during gestation his blood was tainted with the human condition of original sin. We as Christians are made immaculate and perfected by Christ’s sacrifice, all we have to do is accept the gift of salvation He acquired for us and wants us all to have.
I am now going to comment outside of offical Church teaching…Doesn’t it stand to reason that Mary’s consent to God’s will to give birth to Jesus is more than ample acceptance of Jesus ? And, is it not possible that God applied that sacrifice retroactively to the point of her conception because it was necessary for the reasons I have already outlined? I am not a brilliant theologian, and would readily admit that my assertion could be completely preposterous, but Luke tells us “With God, NOTHING is impossible” (emphasis mine).
Luke 1:28 is a very telling passage, if you pay attention to the wording very carefully. “Hail, full of grace…” How many other times in Scripture is a human greeted from an angel with the word “hail” ? Furthermore, all grace comes from Christ. Surely the angel Gabriel knew what he was talking about when he said this. Where could this grace have come from? The answer, of course, is from Christ, but Christ had yet to even be conceived.
In light of the totality of Scripture and God’s revelation to the Israelites, the Immaculate Conception is not near so ridiculous and unfounded as it seems through the lens of 20th century reformation based theology. It speaks not of Mary, but ultimately, of the nature of Jesus as God and as the Christ.
