Hail full of Grace is what Gabriel called her. I heard it explained once that Jesus could do anything he wanted to for his mother because he is God. And being God he is not bound by time - always was, is and will be. So he’s like, I want my mother to be born without original sin and wow, she is born without original sin. She is the holy vessel, the tabernacle of the messiah. Why is that threatening to you?
Do you know that God comes into contact with sinners?
Have any thoughts on how our vile, rebellious natures appear to Him?
Speaking for myself, I’m a sinner against God. I’ve done things in my life that I’m thoroughly ashamed of before God, because I know they are pure spiritual ugliness to Him, prideful, filthy and perverse, and the response of His righteous nature to them is WRATH, His perfectly righteous wrath.
And yet, despite my sins, which are as scarlet, God bore with me through them, and is also willing to touch me. He is willing to allow His Spirit to come into this unclean vessel, and cleanse. But first He had to bear with it, and then He had to touch it to cleanse it.
And that is the case for every human being. Do you have sins you are horrified to think of, but also realize that God, the perfectly holy God, will lay aside His sense of justice, His abhorrence to sin, to touch you out of mercy?
Yes, Mary is a tabernacle, in a sense, of the New Testament. And as the New Testament says believers are the temple of God, we are also tabernacles.
If you are going to look to the Old Testament tabernacle and compare Mary to it, then do it properly. Don’t assume that what goes for one goes for the other, because as the New Testament talks about, the two are not the same. Some things might mean something similar, but some attributes of each tabernacle might point to the differences between the two covenants.
One tabernacle was of wood, dead wood. If it was anything like the modern illustrators try to make out, it is even somewhat coffin-like. The other tabernacle, Mary, and even other Christians, are living beings made in God’s image. There is difference right there. So you need to prove that because the Old Testament tabernacle couldn’t be improperly touched (as it represented God’s Holiness), then necessarily Mary needed to be holy. Because the New Testament, which is the Old Testament revealed, is about faith in God’s mercy, that we aren’t perfect in obeying God’s laws, we’re not and never will be by our own efforts holy, but that God, IN HIS GREAT MERCY, will come to us, touch us and cleanse us anyway, despite us being sinners.
Why are you presuming that is threatening to anyone? Seems like a bit of projection going on there.
Maybe we should ask why the thought that Mary had sin is so threatening to Catholics?
We object to the teaching because it is untrue that Mary was without sin. There is not one shred of Scriptural support for the immaculate conception. It's really nothing more than romanticized wishful thinking.
So following Catholic reasoning, if it was not OK for Jesus to be born of a sinful woman, what makes it OK for Mary to be born of a sinful woman? Didn't SHE deserve better? After all, Catholics insist on calling her *queen of heaven* and claim that God is subservient to her in not being able to deny her any request.