WHAT IS THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION?

Immaculate Conception Cathedral, Pucallpa, Peru. Photo by Eduardo Flores on Unsplash.

In 1858, a fourteen-year-old miller’s daughter from a small Pyrenees town came upon a vision of Mary, who declared, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” The apparition, later known as Our Lady of Lourdes, wasn’t simply legitimizing a papal declaration from four years before. The event confirmed a belief that had evolved over centuries of prayer and reflection: the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived and born without sin.

The term is often confused with the Virgin Birth of Jesus, which is quite understandable: the Immaculate Conception has a lot to do with the Virgin Birth, but the two aren't the same thing. The doctrine directly refers to Mary’s conception and birth, her purpose and identity. It was God’s way of preparing Mary to give birth to Jesus the Son of God and Savior of the world. 

First, "conception." Straightforward but vitally important. As used doctrinally, the word does literally mean her conception, the moment her parents (traditionally named Joachim and Anna) biologically conceived her as their offspring, exactly the same way every other human being has been conceived—except for Jesus. Mary is fully, truly, naturally human. She’s one of us in every possible way.

"Immaculate" is the trickier part, but also the reason why we celebrate her conception at all. That Mary was conceived and born is obvious enough from scripture, but you can't quote the chapter and verse that spells out plainly that she was conceived without sin, much less a precise description of what that means or entails. The closest we get is the angel Gabriel’s “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28) and “Blessed are you among women” from Mary’s cousin Elizabeth (Luke 1:42) A good start, but needs a lot more explaining. 

Throne and Temple

So, where is it? Where in scripture do Christians point when we talk about the Immaculate Conception? 

Again, Mary of Nazareth was conceived, she was born, just like everyone else. She is one of us in every possible way. This means that the basics of the gospel are true for Mary as much as for anyone else. She needs God to “knit her together in her mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13), to make her life happen and to give it meaning. She also needs God to turn her from going “against God” to going “toward God”: she needs her Son’s sacrifice and death to destroy sin and His resurrection and ascension to bring her before our Creator. And she needs to be included in that work of salvation for her life to find meaning.

But she’s the Mother of God: she has a necessary role in the events that make salvation possible for all, including herself. It’s almost a chicken-egg situation: the basics of the gospel are true for everyone because they’re true for Mary first, since she quite literally hatched the Divine egg—Jesus, her son! If the gospel proclaims the Word made Flesh, the Messiah who then suffered and rose again, then that gospel began with Mary as the source of that Word’s very flesh. Jesus gets His humanity from Mary. 

This insight led Christians to find ways of describing her role as the unique bodily recipient of God’s saving presence. Their point of departure was her place in the story of the People of God, in Israel's journey with God. They were brought back to the beginning of Israel’s story by Mary herself, who thanked God for remembering “his promise of mercy . . . to Abraham and his children forever” (Luke 1:54–55).

Abraham is called to leave his father’s house (Genesis 13) and begin a new nation. God then sets apart the whole nation of people descended from Abraham in the same way that God set apart their ancestor: with an exhortation to “be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). Be holy, be immaculate—leave, separate yourself from the self-focused political and material concerns of the surrounding nations and follow God’s design (Torah) for a society that worships God by honoring the dignity of human life.

Abraham’s call to leave his family and Israel’s call to holiness hew tightly to Mary’s identity as “immaculate” and what the term describes. God makes her pure and spotless, as God made Israel pure and spotless, because she is set apart as God’s chosen vessel for the salvation of the world. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception claims that from the start, Mary is turned away from the tug of everyday concerns and especially from selfish pursuits. From the start, she is “turned toward God” and to God’s saving purpose.

In response to Gabriel’s message, she confirms that she is a willing vessel, and quite literally the vessel, where God’s saving presence can enter the world. We see reflections of Mary’s immaculate purpose in the Ark of the Covenant—the Ark isn’t just any old box, but the throne where God meets with the Israelites and gives them the Law (Exodus 25:10–22). The Ark stays in the Tabernacle, which is no ordinary tent, and then the Temple, which is no ordinary building. They are, at different points in Israel’s history, the house where God lives. The Ark, the Tabernacle, and the Temple were designed and built solely to house God’s presence and gather the people to worship. Mary fulfills their purpose; she is set on this path from the moment she is “designed” and “formed” in her mother’s womb. 

Daughter Zion, Lady Wisdom

There are two more images in the Hebrew Scriptures that connect Israel and the Temple’s immaculate purpose to Mary’s own identity. The most direct is the role of “Daughter Zion,” a theme introduced in Psalm 45. A “daughter” is called to “hear . . . listen,” like the way Mary is called to listen to Gabriel. She is then called to leave her father’s house and set aside the cares of her earthly lineage, just like Abraham and the nation are.

Then Zechariah 9:9 tells us what she is meant to expect:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
    Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
    triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

The nation and the Holy City are personified as a daughter, a young girl, to whom the promised King (God and Messiah) will come.

The image of a child especially signifies the nation’s hopes for a future, for strength, which is why childbirth is considered a gift and cause for celebration (Psalm 127:3). Over time, Christians began to apply Zechariah’s hope for the future of the People of God to Mary and Jesus. The King, the Messiah, the God of Israel, has come to Israel and to all creation through a young girl. Mary, daughter of Zion, embodies the nation and its hopes by biologically descending from it and by giving birth to Jesus the Messiah. It’s a heartwarming and stunning twist to patriarchal assumptions: the people have a daughter on whom they rest their hopes. God’s plan is fulfilled not in the strength of military conquest, but in the miracle of childbirth. The King comes on a humble colt (Mark 11). God becomes human in a humble girl.

But we still have a bit of a problem. The Immaculate Conception means that Mary receives the reorienting power of Christ’s redemption, through His crucifixion and resurrection, at a moment decades before the cross and empty tomb. The doctrine also relies on an interpretation of Abraham, the Temple and the People of God that Christians developed centuries after those Hebrew Scriptures were written, and which its authors could not have intended. 

We find our way forward in another profoundly feminine image from Israel’s Bible: the personified Lady Wisdom of Proverbs 8. I’ll quote at length:

Does not wisdom call,
    and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
    at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
    at the entrance of the portals she cries out:

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
    the first of his acts of long ago.

When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
 then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
    rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
    and delighting in the human race.” (vv. 1–3, 22, 27, 29–31)

The Word made Flesh was “in the beginning” (John 1); the Incarnation was the plan all along. Therefore, the necessary means of the Incarnation, the birth of God from a human mother, was part of the plan all along. Mary herself couldn’t transcend time, but God’s all-powerful wisdom, God’s ability to make an eternal plan and carry it out, includes her from that very beginning.

For Christians, the call and promise of Abraham, the holy purpose of the Ark, Tabernacle and Temple, as well as the personification of the people as Daughter Zion were provisional manifestations of that wise plan ultimately fulfilled in the Mother of God and her Son Jesus. They all served to make and sustain a holy people who would give birth to a virgin daughter where the Son of God would dwell. It isn’t history, but rather a poetry more real than history can comprehend—Lady Wisdom, Blessed Mary Immaculate, partners with God through time as the Temple, as the People, and as the Daughter of Zion.

And Lady Wisdom, Blessed Mary Immaculate, calls out to us today. She reminds us that God perpetually possesses the wisdom and power to make a plan to save the world, to include people in that plan, and to set it in motion. God doesn’t just prepare Israel and Mary and include only them in God’s saving work, but all of us. God invites us all to take part, which means God prepares us all to take part. Whatever we’ve experienced—triumphs or setbacks, successes or disappointments—all of it counts as God’s way of bringing us to the moment that we turn to God and hope, “Let it be with me according to your word.”

Postscript: Can Anglicans and Protestants be okay with this?

It’s true that while a papal declaration on post-scriptural tradition means it’s worth paying attention to, that isn't good enough to open it up as an acceptable or necessary thing for Anglicans and Protestants to believe. Even General Councils “may err, and sometimes have erred," as one of Anglicanism’s Thirty-Nine Articles says, (Article XXI, Anglican Church of Canada, BCP, p. 706–707), meaning that the highest of church institutions don't have the final say on doctrine.

But remember that faith in the Immaculate Conception of Mary emerged through centuries of prayer and devotion, reflection, speculation, and clarification of scripture. Christians must've been praying and interpreting something from the inspired Word of God in order to believe so strongly that preserving the Mother of God from sin was an integral part of her role as the Mother of God. While that argument isn’t enough for Anglicans and Protestants to consider the doctrine to be essential to Christianity, like something stated in an official creed, it does mean that Western Christians can believe and celebrate it.