Only When Connected To Our Lord Series

Thursday of 31st Week in Course

At some point in the life of every Catholic theologian, like Saint Paul there comes a time of high clarity. St. Paul’s moment was a time when he realized that all his elevated Jewish theology was just a waste of time. In fact, in the light of Christ’s suffering and death and resurrection, he counted everything he had learned from the rabbis as manure. Remember, St. Paul was a very well educated rabbi, even a Pharisee, who kept all the laws of Leviticus, even though they were actually written for the priests and Levites. But when He heard Christ on the Damascus road, he began to realize just how worthless all his works of righteousness as a Jew had been. He found that only connected to Our Lord could he do anything worthwhile. And to that task he devoted the remainder of his life.

In a real sense, St. Paul was the sheep that was lost, and Jesus left the heavens to seek him out and find him and turn him toward the truth. This parable of Christ’s would be absolute madness to an economist, or even a half-smart sheep farmer. You count your sheep as you usher them into the pen for the night. You started with a hundred, and one is unaccounted for. Do you leave the ninety-nine exposed to wolves and bandits to go find the lost one? That’s just crazy, a way to lose them all.

But Jesus is saying this for effect. It sounds like hyperbole, but it is not. God loves each one of us so much that He left the heavens and gave His life so that we might be saved–collectively and individually. He would have done it if there was only one human being needing help. Jesus is trying to make that point here–it’s worth losing everything to keep one human soul from hell.

But God doesn’t act alone. He always acts in a community–ideally a family. When He became human, He didn’t just take on a human appearance like he did thousands of years earlier with Abraham or Jacob. He became human in the womb of a woman, Mary. And she became His real human mother.

Our saint of today is Blessed John Duns Scotus, an English Franciscan. From my philosophical and theological studies, I can say that his thought really makes me feel stupid. But he did one thing that I both agree with and kind of get. He defended the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Now nobody has ever claimed that Mary was a sinner, but the Immaculate Conception dogma teaches that she was preserved from all sin and the effects of Original Sin from the first moment of her existence. For the rest of us, Jesus in baptism finds us down a manhole in a sewer and lifts us up out of that awful place. For Mary, Jesus at her conception prevents her from falling down the manhole into the sewer. It’s all the work of Christ’s redemptive suffering and death.

“At the time, there was a great deal of argument about the subject. The general opinion was that it was appropriately deferential to the Mother of God, but it could not be seen how to resolve the problem that only with Christ's death would the stain of original sin be removed. . .The feast day had existed in the East. . .since the seventh century and had been introduced in several dioceses in the West as well, even though the philosophical basis was lacking. Citing Anselm of Canterbury's principle, ‘(He [i.e., God] could do it, it was appropriate, therefore He did it)’, Duns Scotus devised the following argument: Mary was in need of redemption like all other human beings, but through the merits of Jesus' crucifixion, given in advance, she was conceived without the stain of original sin. God could have brought it about (1) that she was never in original sin, (2) she was in sin only for an instant, (3) she was in sin for a period of time, being purged at the last instant. Whichever of these options was most excellent should probably be attributed to Mary.

“Scotus's argument appears in Pope Pius IX's 1854 declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, "at the first moment of Her conception, Mary was preserved free from the stain of original sin, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ." He is called the “subtle doctor” by the Church. So we can pray “John Duns Scotus, pray for us.”