Some people have the notion the Virgin Birth was a sort of divine stunt meant to impress people about Jesus’ bona fides during his public ministry and get them to believe he is the Son of God. But this is false for two reasons.
First, God does not do stunts. The request for stunts was repeatedly rebuffed by Jesus. Pharisees demanding stunts were told, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (Matthew 16:4). When Herod Antipas similarly sought for some magic trick from Jesus, he came away empty-handed (cf. Luke 23:8-9). Jesus comes to seek relationship with us, not to entertain, titillate, or gratify idle curiosity. All attempts to reduce him to a performing monkey—especially from enemies of relationship with him—meet with failure. Most especially, while he will answer (often in riddles) questions asked in order to find things out, there is no record of him answering questions asked in order to keep from finding things out.
The second reason it is false to think the Virgin Birth is a stunt is that stunts are done to ballyhoo and attract attention while the Virgin Birth was, in fact, unknown to Jesus’ contemporaries and only became a part of the preached message of the Church, as far we can tell, after his earthly ministry.
In reality then, the early Church does not treat his Virgin Birth as a stunt, but as a sign. Why a sign? Because having met the Risen Christ, they have been instructed by his own mouth that he himself is the point of “Moses and all the prophets” (Luke 24:27) and they very understandably include in that remark the words of the prophet Isaiah 7:14:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanu-el.
How they came to see those words applying to Jesus we shall discuss in Chapter 8. But the point, for the moment, is this: signs signify and the early Church therefore took the Virgin Birth to be loaded with significance because they took the whole life of Jesus to be loaded with significance.
The primary thing the Virgin Birth signifies is that the entire project of salvation is God’s initiative, not ours. As the Catechism says:
Mary’s virginity manifests God’s absolute initiative in the Incarnation. Jesus has only God as Father. “He was never estranged from the Father because of the human nature which he assumed . . . He is naturally Son of the Father as to his divinity and naturally son of his mother as to his humanity, but properly Son of the Father in both natures” (Council of Friuli (796): DS 619; cf. Luke 2:48-49). (CCC 503).
Jesus is born, “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). This occurs, not for his benefit, but for ours, as do all the other signs of his life. He did not need to be born of a virgin, as though the Incarnation would have been impossible any other way. God chose to be born of a virgin as he chose to multiply loaves and fishes, heal the sick, and raise the dead: as a sign to us of who he is and why he came.
Mary as Perpetual Virgin, New Eve, and Ark of the Covenant
There are only two mortals mentioned in the Creed. Mary is one of them. The Virgin Birth does not happen to a generic anonymous figure. It happens to a particular person set apart from all eternity by God for the honor, acting with her full and free cooperation and all of her faculties. When she says, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38) she demonstrates the paradox of divine grace at work in the human heart: that the freedom of God does not cancel our free will but rather that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17).
More than this, Mary becomes a sign for us. Her choice to remain a virgin all the days of her life was therefore seen as a sign by the Church as well. Because of his sovereign initiative in saving us by entering into our humanity, we are, so to speak, made members of a new human race headed by a New Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45–50). But that New Adam has a corresponding figure: the New Eve whose “yes” to God allows life to enter into the world just as the “no” of the first Eve brought death into the world. And that “yes” is the fruit both of God’s predestining grace and of her own free assent:
Thus, giving her consent to God’s word, Mary becomes the mother of Jesus. Espousing the divine will for salvation wholeheartedly, without a single sin to restrain her, she gave herself entirely to the person and to the work of her Son; she did so in order to serve the mystery of redemption with him and dependent on him, by God’s grace (Cf. Lumen Gentium 56):
As St. Irenaeus says, “Being obedient she became the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race” (St. Irenaeus, Adv. haeres. 3, 22, 4: PG 7/1, 959A). Hence not a few of the early Fathers gladly assert. . . : “The knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience: what the virgin Eve bound through her disbelief, Mary loosened by her faith” (St. Irenaeus, Adv. haeres. 3, 22, 4: PG 7/1, 959A). Comparing her with Eve, they call Mary “the Mother of the living” and frequently claim: “Death through Eve, life through Mary” (Lumen Gentium 56; Epiphanius, Haer. 78, 18: PG 42, 728CD-729AB; St. Jerome, Ep. 22, 21: PL 22, 408). (CCC 494)
All of which means that Mary is identified with the family of the New Adam just as much as the old Eve was identified with the family of the old Adam. Therefore, Mary’s virginity is a sign of joy that echoes down the ages even more than the weeping from the fall of Eve.
This is not something alien to the gospels. Both Luke’s account of the nativity and the book of Revelation will link the Blessed Virgin to the holiest object in all of Old Testament Israelite religion: the Ark of the Covenant. That’s what “the power of the Most High will overshadow you” meant. The word for “overshadow” (episkiasei) is the same one used in the Greek version of the Old Testament to describe the cloud of glory known in Hebrew as the Shekinah that came down on the Tabernacle wherein the Ark of the Covenant rested.
Likewise, Revelation offers this visionary version of the story of the Incarnation and the trials of the Virgin and the early Church in these terms:
Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple; and there were flashes of lightning, loud noises, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail.
And a great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. And another sign appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth; she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days. (Revelation 11:19-12:6)
Note how the mind of the sacred writer moves seamlessly from the image of the Ark of the Covenant to the Woman clothed with the sun who gives birth to the male child destined to rule the nations. And note how he also encapsulates all the sufferings and hope of the Church in an image that combines Herod’s attempt on the life of the infant Jesus, the exile of the Holy Family in Egypt and Jesus’ Death, Resurrection and Ascension. Not for nothing does St. Ambrose of Milan tell us that, “Mary is the type of the Church.”[1]
[1] St. Ambrose, Expos. Lc. II, 7: PL 15, 1555.
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