When Heaven Marked the Earth
MASS Salve sancta
LESSON Eccles. 24. 14-16
GOSPEL St Luke 11:27-28
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
In the furnace of a Roman August, snow fell upon the Esquiline Hill. According to the venerable tradition of this feast, the Blessed Virgin appeared during the night to Pope Liberius and to a Roman patrician, commanding that a church should be built in her honour upon the place which heaven itself would indicate. At dawn, the summit of the hill was found clothed in white, and upon that miraculous snow the outline of the future sanctuary was traced.
The Church has never regarded such signs as isolated curiosities. She reads them sacramentally, as visible things pointing beyond themselves to invisible mysteries. It is therefore difficult to contemplate the snow of the Esquiline without hearing the Advent cry of the Church: Rorate caeli desuper, et nubes pluant Justum: aperiatur terra, et germinet Salvatorem—“Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One; let the earth be opened and bud forth a Saviour.”
The snow was not itself the fulfilment of that prophecy. The fulfilment was the Incarnation. Yet it was a fitting image of the manner in which God saves. Something descended from heaven which the earth could never produce by its own power. The earth received the gift, was clothed in purity, and became the chosen site of a dwelling for God.
So it was with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Heaven descended; the earth opened; the Saviour sprang forth.
The Introit of today’s Mass therefore places before us not first the snow, nor Rome, nor the basilica, but the divine maternity: “Hail, holy Mother, who didst bring forth the King who ruleth heaven and earth for ever and ever.” The Church begins with Christ. Every true Marian doctrine is ultimately a confession concerning Him. The greatness of the Mother rests wholly upon the identity of her Son.
Mary is truly the Mother of God because the Person whom she conceived and bore is God the Son. She did not give origin to His divinity, for the Word is eternally begotten of the Father. Yet from her own substance He assumed the human nature in which He was born, suffered, died and rose again.
The scholastic distinction is exact and indispensable: motherhood terminates in the person, not merely in the nature. A mother does not give birth to an abstraction called “humanity”; she gives birth to a person possessing human nature. The Person born of Mary is the eternal Word. Therefore she is not merely the mother of Christ’s humanity, but truly Theotokos, Mother of God.
This truth was defended at the Council of Ephesus in the year 431, and soon afterwards Pope Sixtus III caused the great basilica of Saint Mary Major to be raised upon the Esquiline. Its mosaics became a monumental proclamation of the faith of Ephesus. Rome answered the denial of Mary’s divine maternity by setting before the world a sanctuary which declared in stone and gold: the Child of Bethlehem is Emmanuel, God with us.
To honour Mary as Mother of God is therefore not to place her beside God as a rival. It is to defend the unity of Christ. To diminish the Mother’s title is ultimately to divide the Son, as though the man born of her were a separate human person merely associated with the Word. But there is only one Christ: one divine Person, subsisting in two natures, divine and human, without confusion, change, division or separation.
The Gradual expresses the mystery with holy astonishment: “He whom the whole world cannot contain hath shut Himself within thy womb, becoming man.” The Creator of space is enclosed within the womb of a creature. Eternity enters time. Omnipotence assumes weakness. He who feeds every living thing receives nourishment from His Mother. He whose hand fashioned the stars allows that hand to be guided by hers.
This is the divine manner of acting. The world associates power with display, noise and self-assertion. God descends silently. Grace falls like dew. The Word takes flesh in the obscurity of Nazareth. The King of heaven hides beneath the heart of a Virgin.
And He continues to act in the same manner. He hides beneath the appearances of bread and wine. He enters the soul invisibly through grace. His greatest works are ordinarily wrought in silence. The world may command attention by spectacle, but heaven transforms the earth without clamour.
The Advent text continues: “Let the earth be opened.” Grace comes first. Man cannot generate supernatural life, forgive his own sins or climb by natural strength into the friendship of God. Redemption is not the flowering of humanity’s native goodness. It is a gift from above, wholly unmerited in its origin.
Yet grace does not destroy nature. It heals, elevates and moves it. Nor does it treat the will as though it were dead matter. God acts first, but man must consent beneath the action of grace.
In Mary we see this harmony in perfection. Everything begins with God: her preservation from original sin, the mission of the angel, the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost, the conception of the Word. Yet Mary is not inert. She answers freely: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to thy word.”
Heaven descended because God willed it. The earth opened because Mary consented.
Saint Thomas teaches that the consent of the Virgin was fittingly sought because the Incarnation was a kind of spiritual espousal between the Son of God and human nature. Mary, in a singular manner, gave the consent of humanity to the coming of its Redeemer. Her fiat did not command heaven; it surrendered to heaven. It did not design the divine plan; it received it.
Here the feast speaks with particular force to the modern world. Our age wishes to create rather than receive. It treats nature as raw material, the body as an instrument of autonomous choice, truth as a personal construction, morality as a negotiation and religion as something to be reshaped according to the spirit of the age.
Christianity begins elsewhere. We receive existence, nature, sex, family, revelation, grace and redemption. Reality is gift before it is task. We do not instruct heaven what it may send. We open ourselves to what heaven has revealed.
The snow upon the Esquiline did not merely beautify the hill. It marked the ground. It established form and boundary. Pope Liberius did not choose a place according to his own preference and then ask heaven to approve it. Heaven indicated the site, and man built in obedience.
So too the commandments mark the ground upon which holiness may be built. Divine law is not the enemy of freedom but the architecture of freedom. A life without boundaries does not become spacious; it becomes formless. A religion without received doctrine does not become more generous; it ceases to be revelation and becomes the echo of contemporary opinion.
This truth applies not only to the individual soul but also to the Church. The Church does not manufacture the Faith. She receives, guards and transmits it. Her authority is real, but it is ministerial. She is the steward of a divine deposit, not its proprietor. Whenever men of the Church behave as though doctrine, worship or morality were materials to be perpetually reconstructed, they cease to imitate Mary, who did not revise the message of Gabriel but submitted herself to it: “Be it done unto me according to thy word.”
The purity signified by the snow must also be rightly understood. Mary’s purity is not emptiness, coldness or mere absence. It is plenitude and perfect order. She is pure because she belongs entirely to God. Her intellect adheres without shadow to truth; her will inclines without resistance to the good; her body is consecrated to the Incarnation; her heart admits no rival to divine charity.
Christian purity is likewise more than the avoidance of particular sins. It is the restoration of order within the person. Sin fragments us. It makes reason serve appetite, freedom serve impulse, the body serve vanity and even religion serve self-will. Grace reunites what sin has scattered and places the whole person beneath the kingship of Christ.
The Epistle speaks of Wisdom taking root in an honourable people and making her abode among the saints. Eternal Wisdom is the Word Himself, yet the Church fittingly applies the text to Mary because Wisdom took root within her. She is the good earth opened to receive the heavenly seed, the enclosed garden, the living ark and the sanctuary not made by human hands.
Saint Mary Major is associated also with the relics of the Holy Crib and has therefore been called the Bethlehem of the West. The basilica joins the majesty of Rome to the poverty of the manger. It reminds us that Christianity is not an idea. God entered history. He was born of a real woman, wrapped in real cloth and laid upon real wood.
The Mother who once laid Him upon the wood of the crib saw Him stretched upon the wood of the Cross. The flesh taken from her is wounded. The Blood formed beneath her heart is poured out for the redemption of the world.
Then Christ says to Saint John: “Behold thy mother.” At the very hour when He offers Himself for mankind, He gives His Mother to the redeemed. Her maternity expands beneath the Cross. She who is Mother of Christ according to the flesh becomes mother of Christ’s members according to grace.
Her intercession does not compete with the mediation of Christ. It depends upon it wholly. Every grace comes from His merits, His sacrifice and His priesthood. Yet the Redeemer Himself wills that His Mother should pray for those whom He has purchased, and that His disciples should receive her into their own.
This is why the Collect asks that, through her glorious intercession, we may enjoy health of mind and body, be delivered from present sorrow and attain everlasting gladness. The Church understands that the deepest sickness of man is not bodily but spiritual: a darkened intellect, a weakened will, disordered passions and a heart divided against itself.
Our age is feverish. It is restless, overstimulated and incapable of silence. It possesses information without wisdom, communication without communion, freedom without finality and appetite without peace.
The snow of grace must fall upon us.
It must cool the fever of passion, silence the clamour of self-will, cleanse the stain of sin and mark once more the ground which belongs to God. But the snow is not given merely to be admired. It marks a building site. Upon that ground a sanctuary must be raised by prayer, penance, confession, worthy Communion, fidelity to duty and patient acceptance of the Cross.
At this altar the mystery of Rorate caeli is sacramentally renewed. The Just One descends from heaven beneath the sacred species. The same Christ who took flesh in the womb of Mary, lay in the crib and hung upon the Cross comes to make His dwelling within us.
Heaven descends. The earth must open.
May Our Lady of the Snows obtain for us the humility to receive what God sends, the purity to belong to Him without reserve, and the courage to build our lives according to the ground which heaven has marked. May our souls become living basilicas: sanctuaries in which Christ is welcomed, worshipped and never displaced.
Rorate caeli desuper. Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above.
Aperiatur terra. Let the earth be opened.
And may Christ, the Saviour born of Mary, take root and reign within us.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Homilies Archive
Mass Propers
DAILY MASS ONLINE
One of the earliest online apostolates dedicated to the Traditional Latin Mass, Old Roman TV began broadcasting the Holy Sacrifice on the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August 2008. During the COVID-19 pandemic, additional programming — devotions, catechesis, and conferences — was added to support the faithful in prayer and formation.
Support the daily Holy Mass on Old Roman TV by offering a Mass intention — for loved ones, thanksgiving, or the repose of souls. Your intention helps sustain the sacred liturgy and brings grace to those you remember before God’s altar.
SUPPORT THE DAILY MASS ONLINE
Likely the world’s longest-running daily online broadcast of the
Traditional Latin Mass, streaming faithfully since the
Feast of the Assumption 2008.
This apostolate cannot continue without immediate help
Please support us with a contribution toward
chapel rent, sacristy supplies, operating costs, and web-hosting.
Our essential monthly costs reach £1,000.
Leave a Reply