Prevenient grace is the term applied by the Church's magisterium to the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In Ineffabilis Deus, the papal bull promulgated in 1854, by which Pope Pius IX dogmatically declared our Blessed Mother's Immaculate Conception, we read:
the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conceptoin, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, we preserved free from all stain of original sinPrevenient grace is often conflated with the broad term grace, which is multi-faceted. Prevenient grace is given without any effort on our part. You can't earn it. It shows that it is God who takes the initiative through Jesus Christ to bring about your salvation. You can only cooperate with prevenient grace or choose not to cooperate.
Prevenient grace segues nicely with our reading from Romans, especially the phrase "those he foreknew he also predestined."1 The destiny of every person is eternal life. This is what God made us for and what Christ redeemed us for. Unlike the government of Oceania in Orwell's 1984, God does not force your cooperation. He will not make you love Him. In one sense God is no respecter of persons but in another, God respects us as persons made in His image.
We see this in Blessed Mary's fiat, her words to Gabriel: "be it done unto me according to your word."2 While God preveniently chose Mary to be the mother of His Son, it was a risk. As creation itself shows, God is a risk-taker.
Conceived in the normal way but without the "stain" of original sin aided this young Nazarene woman to see things more clearly than those of us tainted by the fallen human condition. Nonetheless, God hinged the Incarnation on her free cooperation. Existence, after all, is not a puppet show, and we are not puppets. So, we must be careful when addressing predestination, misunderstandings of which have led to evil theologies, like the idea that God creates some people only to damn them.
As it turns out, like God, the Blessed Virgin, too, is a risk-taker. But isn't love always a risk? What has caused you more anguish and heartache than love? Next Monday, the day day after we celebrate the Exalation of the Holy Cross, we observe the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows.
On the flip side, what has caused you more genuine joy than love? Like her Son, who embraced the shame of the cross "for the joy that lay before him," Blessed Mary embraced the shame of turning up pregnant out of wedlock in a society in which that might lead to being to stoned to death for the joy that lay before her.3 Trusting God completely, this young woman, Miriam of Nazareth, enthusiastically embraced becoming the Mother of God.
The Blessed Virgin Mary is the model disciple. She shows us how to follow Christ, her Son, how to trust Him completely. Trusting Christ is easy to say but hard to do, especially when your life goes sideways, like Mary's unexpected pregnancy.
I am quite certain that prior to the appearance of the archangel Gabriel, bearing the Son of God was not in the short or long term plans of our Blessed Mother. But when God called, she responded enthusiastically. She chose to take the risk, trusting God's holy will.
As to the genealogy that comprises most of our Gospel, a slightly updated passage from an Advent homily given by the Dominical theologian Father Herbert McCabe many years ago cuts to the chase:
Well, that is the Book of the Generation of Jesus Christ. The moral is too obvious to labour Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of [Jan Karon, Eleanor H. Porter or Louisa May Alcott], to the honest , reasonable, sincere world of the [Washington Post] or [New York Times]. He belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars. No wonder He came to a bad end, and gave us some hope4. Excepting His mother, or course. There really is something about Mary. Today, we thank God for her.
1 Romans 8:30.↩
2 Luke 1:38.↩
3 Hebrews 12:2.↩
4 Herbert McCabe, OP. God Matters, "The genealogy of Christ," pgs 246-249. Mowbray, 2000- [updated words in brackets]↩
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