Today marks the beginning of a new year in the secular calendar, 2012. As usual there will be all sorts of celebrations across the globe, counting out the seconds of the old year and welcoming the new with parties, singing, embracing, good wishes and, in many places, fireworks of one sort or another. People will probably experience a combination of feelings: gratitude for having survived yet another difficult twelve months together with a sense of optimism, that things will be better in the year to come. Among the principal things on popular wish-lists will be good health and prosperity.

There seems to be a native hopefulness in the human spirit. Many people base this on ‘good luck’, superstition or some such while others believe firmly that life is not a matter of favourable chance but rather of actually taking hold of their existence and personally shaping it through their own responsible choices and actions. Christians, I think, belong to the latter group. They might well be the ones who subscribe to the Russian definition of an optimist: a pessimist with more information!

The ground of Christian hopefulness and measured optimism is faith in God who took leave of divine eternal Self-Sufficiency and entered our human history, not in disguise but in the recognisable shape of human createdness. Christians call this the Incarnation. The mystery of God-becoming-one-of-us was not the result of some unilateral intervention by God. God did not impose the Incarnation but rather made it dependent and conditional on a human act of faith and will. It was nature cooperating with Grace. Together with the Power (Spirit) of God it was Mary of Nazareth in her personal freedom who made Immanuel, God-with-us,
not only possible but real.

Christians mark NewYear’s day by celebrating the memory of Mary and thanking God for her act of faith and grace. In the western Church Mary is on this day acknowledged as Mother of God. This title given her at the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD. She is particularly revered under this name in the eastern Churches where the original title carries a great deal more of who exactly she became in human history. That Tradition recognises Mary as the mother of the divine Son of God and become human in her Son Jesus. She is honoured and celebrated as Theotokos, the woman-who-birthed-God.

The Eastern Christians from the early days of their Tradition believed that God would have become human at some time and accomplished a gentle reconciliation with humanity regardless of the typical Western guilt-ridden preoccupation with a bloody sacrifice of atonement. God always planned to be ‘with us’ and not just from a distance!

In Mary Theotokos we celebrate the greatest ‘glory of our race’ and in doing so we pay homage to God who risked the whole Mystery of Faith by entrusting it to the free will of a young Palestinian Jewish woman, the wife of Joseph, a tradesman and peasant farmer, in an outpost of Roman colonialism. How fragile and tenuous it all was.

Today is the feast day of God’s trust in humanity and, through Mary’s graceful faith, humanity’s trusting partnership with God in the great work of Restoration and Reconciliation. Today marks not just the beginning of a new secular year but it celebrates above all, in sacred memory, the beginning of a new History of Grace.

Today we are invited anew to take God seriously just as God took humanity seriously in Mary. She is our model for us, through Baptism, to be God-birthers, revealing God in our own common human shape, face and lived existence.

January 1^{st is the Christian day to celebrate our confidence and optimism which are grounded firmly in God’s loving confidence and self-investment in us. Paul of Tarsus was so utterly convinced of this that he wrote to the Roman community,}

….For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (8: 38-39).

^{Mary Theotokos confirms by the evidence of her own faith life and relationship with God the sure and certain grounds of this conviction.}

^{David Timbs blogs from Melbourne, Australia.}