Preaching at St Mary’s Rufford on Sunday, August 17th Revd Dr Tom Woolford said:
I have bought probably about eight of these [travel adapter].
I should only ever have needed one, but what tends to happen is that either I forget to pack one, and then have to purchase one at the airport so I can charge my phone or whatever; or else at the end of a stay somewhere, unplug my charger but neglect to unplug the adapter into which the charger was plugged. This way I have donated travel adapters to some of the finest historic cities of Europe.
Why do we need a travel adapter? Why is it, in fact, essential to the phenomenon of modern travel? Well, because the stuff I have (that I depend on) is incompatible with that which could provide what I need. Without access to power, I’d have no train and plane tickets, no maps, could take no photos, no way to pay, no means of communication. I’d be lost, alone, and away forever (alright, slightly exaggerated and melodramatic – but go with me).
This works as an analogy for the human problem to which the gospel is God’s solution. We are like British three-pin plugs while God the Father is a two-pin European socket. By our nature, we are unable to connect to what we need – to the One who could give us the electricity of his Spirit, who would power us up for eternal life.
Now, there’s a moral dimension to the human problem: namely, our sin in the face of God’s holiness. God’s holiness is so searingly perfect, so dazzlingly pure, so astonishingly absolute, so fiercely good that it would incinerate any speck of guilt, shame, disobedience and defiance that it lights upon. That’s a problem for those of us who are stained and soiled by our greed, lies, selfishness, ingratitude, and anger. In our socket analogy, that’s shoving keys in the pin-holes and switching it on: sparks of hot fury shower out and singe or burn the wall and carpet. I saw this happen live when I was in my first year at high school – a boy in my form did it and short-circuited the whole school. We had an extended lunchbreak while electrical engineers came to fix it – and the boy escaped being expelled but was put in solitary lunch- and breaktime detentions for a whole term. Our sin, then, disqualifies us from presuming or daring to plug into God: it is too dangerous – eternally spiritually fatal, even – to approach the Father with the dirty old keys of our rebellion in thought, word, and deed against his holy law.
The Cross of Christ is God’s answer to this aspect of our helpless plight. At Calvary, Christ cleaned up our corroded and grubby souls by taking our moral dirt upon himself. If you had the previous chapter of Galatians in front of you, you would be able to read in verse 13 that, ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.’ The Lord Jesus, so to speak, volunteered to face the fatal zap of the Father’s fury on our sin so that we did not have to. In this way, as our lection puts it, he redeemed those under the law: he purchased our forgiveness and freedom at his own expense.
But this is only half – and, indeed, it is the second half – of the story. The first half brings us back to this [travel adapter] again. Quite apart from the moral problem of our sin and God’s holiness, there’s an even more basic problem of our essential incompatibility with God the Father. On the one hand, we’ve got the eternal, omniscient, omniscient, omnipresent, incomprehensible, ineffable, unchangeable, limitless and almighty Creator and Sovereign of all universes and all ages; on the other, we’ve got these weak, temporary, physical, dependent, limited specs of dust – occupying a single small slice of space for the blink of an eye (then ‘the wind passeth over it, and it is gone’). As Psalm 8 puts it, ‘What is man, that you are mindful of him?’ The gulf in our very being between humanity and God is infinite, unbounded, unfordable. By our nature, we could no more hope to connect with God than we could long jump over the Grand Canyon. We are then, in essence, incompatible with God.
But the gospel answers this problem also. Jesus Christ is our travel adapter. He is, as we confess in the Creed in this 1700th year of its recital,
the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Jesus is, in his Person and his nature, entirely and seamlessly integrated into the life of the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. He is fully God. But,
For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven,
by the power of the Holy Spirit was incarnate from the Virgin Mary
and was made man.
Or in the words of our Galatians reading (Galatians 4:4),
When the fulness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.
The Son of God became a son of man: he took on a second nature – a human nature – so as to be made like us in every way (except for sin). This is what then qualifies Jesus to be the Mediator who in his Person fully bridges that chasm in natures between humanity and God: he participates fully in the divine life of the Father, and fully in the human life of each of us – and so by the gift and indwelling of his Spirit, we in him are joined to the life of God. Indeed, as our passage puts it, we in the Son of God by nature become children of God by adoption: because adopted children, we can call upon Jesus’ Father as our Father; and because adopted children, we are not slaves but heirs. Christ is the travel adapter, then: we in our human nature may plug in to him, and he, by his divine nature, is plugged into God: therefore we, in and through him, access the electricity of the Father’s life and favour forever.
Today, St Mary’s Church celebrates its patronal festival: today is a translated feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and this passage is one of the suite of readings appointed for this occasion. But why? Why does this paragraph of the Epistle to the Galatians celebrate and honour Mary? Well, because the whole gospel edifice – the whole plan and realization of God’s salvation – depends in an important sense upon her; on her ‘yes’ to God, and on her very body. For, as St Paul writes in that verse already cited,
When the fulness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.
‘Born of a woman’ is not a redundant or superfluous phrase there: it is an indispensable and precious truth. The underlying Greek is even more blunt: it could be translated, ‘God sent his Son, made out of a woman.’ Jesus is the travel adaptor – not Mary. He is the Mediator between humanity and God, not she. But where did ‘the stuff’ come from, from which God fashioned the device that his Son would assume for our salvation? Where was the raw material sourced for the human substance of our Lord’s nature so that through his incarnation (and death and resurrection) we might be joined to God? From his mother. ‘From a woman.’ From the Woman. There’s no human father involved. God clothes his eternal son only in the flesh of Mary, miraculously prepared and sanctified by the Spirit in her virgin womb.
As Irenaeus noticed in his second-century writings, there’s a beautiful symmetry here that integrates creation and redemption: the first woman was made out of a man, Eve being formed entirely from Adam’s body. In a mirror image that completes the work of God, the Second Adam was formed entirely from a woman. The renewed humanity and new creation bursts into our world through the Son of God, the perfect Image of the Father, being made flesh from the body of his Mother.
There is a sense, then, in which we who become sons of God by adoption through the Son of God by nature, acquire Jesus’ Father as our Father and his Mother as our mother. It’s by no means symmetrical, but Mary’s motherhood in-a-sense is something beautiful that we receive through her Son (just as he made John her Son at the Cross).
The Blessed Virgin Mary, then, is part of the gospel: the whole fabric of incarnation, atonement, and salvation unravels without her consent and without her flesh. Jesus alone is the travel adaptor – the One in whom we are connected to God – but she provided its components. While so many of our plastic and electronic goods come stamped, ‘Made in China,’ Jesus as the God-man in whom we receive salvation comes to us stamped, ‘Made in Mary.’
Church history and church tradition bears witness to varying beliefs concerning the implications of this for Mariology. So, because (a) Jesus is made from Mary’s flesh, (b) there’s a relationship between sin and nature (as seen in the Fall), and (c) we know for a fact that Jesus is free of the stain of sin; many in church history have believed and taught that Mary must have been herself sinless from birth so as to provide her Son with a sinless body when the time came – this belief (the Immaculate Conception) became dogma in the Roman Catholic Church in 1854. Or again, because (a) the substance of Mary’s body is the same as the substance of Jesus’ body (with God presumably doing something clever with chromosomes so that Jesus would be born male), and (b) God would not allow the human body of his holy One to see decay (as prophesied in Psalm 16); many from the fifth century onwards took advantage of the silence of the New Testament and the earliest Christian sources on what happened to Mary at the end of her life to suggest that perhaps it would be appropriate that her body should not have decomposed like everyone else’s, but might instead have been (like her Son) resurrected and ascended bodily to heaven ahead of the general resurrection at the Last Day. This belief (called the Assumption and celebrated for a thousand years on 15th August – hence the translated major feast day for Mary today) became dogma in the Roman Catholic Church in 1950.
Because neither the Immaculate Conception nor the Assumption are taught in the Bible, they are not articles of faith for us as Anglicans: you are free to believe them or not, no biggie. But they are possible and some would say fittingimplications of what we’ve seen must be true from this verse:
When the fulness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.
Whether you go along with the Immaculate Conception and/or the Assumption or not, we ought all recognise, honour, and yes, celebrate Mary’s indispensable place in the good news of our redemption. All generations should call her blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for her and also through her.
Let us pray.
Almighty God,
we thank you that in the fulness of time you sent your Son,
born of a woman, born under the law,
that we might be redeemed and adopted as your children.
Especially today we bless you for the faith and obedience of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
through whose ‘yes’ and from whose flesh your eternal Word became man for us.
Grant that, following her example of trust,
we may cling to Christ our Saviour and share the life he brings;
through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
