Conceived by the Holy Ghost – Personally!
March 25th is nine months before Christmas Day and is thus the day the Church commemorates the conception of Jesus by Mary. However, since Mary was a pure Virgin, the conception was miraculous and outside the laws of nature for no male semen was involved.
St Luke provides us with the account of the conception in his Gospel at 1:26-38. The angel Gabriel descended from heaven to earth as the messenger of YHWH, the LORD God, to the young, unmarried maiden and told her that she had found favour with God. This meant that she would conceive and bear to termination a son, to be called Jesus, and he would be called “the Son of the Most High”.
When amazed and frightened, Mary asked how this could be, she was told that it would occur by direct, divine intervention. The Holy Ghost, not a man, would [as it were] come upon her, and (expressed in a parallel way) God whose Name is “the Power of the most High” will hover over her so that she shall conceive solely and miraculously by divine intervention. Her SON will thus be unique and holy, the Son of God incarnate.
Mary accepted her calling and submitted to the will of Heaven: “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to thy word.” Then she conceived and the Incarnation occurred.
SO IMPORTANT did Christendom regard this day that in England, for example, the secular year (as we call it) began on this day and this practice was not changed until the eighteenth century (when the Enlightenment was having its influence) to January 1st. Christendom truly could be said to have its immediate origins in the conception by Mary of the Lord Jesus Christ. (Even to this day the tax year for persons and business is based on the former year!)
One of the great tragedies of modern church life and of the translating of ancient Creeds has been the rendering in both the Apostles & Nicene Creeds “conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit” (a translation now rejected but widely in use in prayer books produced in the 1970s and 1980s – e.g. the ECUSA Prayer Book). Jesus was not conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost but by the Holy Ghost himself, in Person. You and I, and all the creation, are procreated by the power of the Holy Spirit, working through and in the laws of nature. Jesus was not so conceived. The Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, was personally present in heavenly grace and power to effect the conception. Further, the conception by Mary was also the Incarnation, the assuming of human flesh and nature by the eternal Word and only-begotten Son of the Father.
To say “conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit” is thus, strictly speaking, to reject the Incarnation of the Son of God!
The Collect for this Day in the classic Book of Common Prayer (1549 etc) is not the Collect in the old Latin Missals but is rather the Post-Communion Prayer for this Day. Archbishop Crammer and his colleagues judged the Latin Collect to be not satisfactory for it requested the intercession of Mary and thus used instead the Post-Communion Prayer. This Collect connects the Incarnation with the vocation of the Suffering Servant of God (Isaiah 52-53) who redeems his people through death and resurrection.
“We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that as we have known the Incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
The medieval Latin Collect rejected may be translated as follows: “O God, who didst will thy Word to take flesh from the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the announcement of the angel; grant unto us thy suppliants that as we believe her truly to be the mother of God, so we may be assisted by her intercessions with thee, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon M.A., D.Phil. (Oxon.),
Christ Church, Biddulph Moor & St Anne's, Brown Edge
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