March 25: today the Annunciation of the Lord is celebrated

Annunciation of the Lord
March 25-Solemnity
Liturgical Color: White

The beat of a wing, a rustle in the air, a voice, and the future has begun to begin

The feast of the Annunciation is the reason why we celebrate Christmas on December 25th Christmas exactly nine months after the Archangel Gabriel invited the Virgin Mary to be the Mother of God, an event we commemorate on March 25th The dating of these holidays although interesting, it is of less importance than their theological significance. It is fruitful to reflect on the incarnation of Jesus Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary as the antecedent for the explosion of joy, caroling, giving gift, eating, drinking, love and the family of unity that surrounds birth of the Savior. Maybe Maria had a sort of private and internal Christmas at the time of the Annunciation. Perhaps he felt the fullness of the joy of the world within Christmas of his heart, when he realized that he had been chosen to be the Mother of God.

God could have become man in any number of creative ways. He could have incarnated himself just as Adam incarnated in the book of Genesis, being formed of clay and having the divine breath blown into his nostrils. O God could have slowly put his feet on the ground on a golden ladder as tall as a twenty-five-year-old man, ready to travel the main and secondary roads of Palestine. Or maybe God could have taken meat in an unknown way and just been found, like Moses, floating in a basket by a young childless couple from Nazareth as they enjoyed a Sunday picnic along the Jordan River.

The second person of the Trinity chose, instead, to become man as we all become man. In the same way that he would leave the world through the door of death, like all we have to do, before his resurrection and ascension, He also entered the world through the door of human birth. In the words of the early Church, Christ could not redeem what he did not take on. He redeemed everything because He assumed human nature in all its breadth, depth, complexity and mystery. He was like us in everything except sin.

The incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity was a self-emptying. It was God choosing to become small. Imagine a man becoming an ant while maintaining his human mind and will. The man-turn-ant seems to be like all the ants around him, and would have participated in all of their ant activities, but I keep thinking about a level far above them. There was no other way to do it. Man had to learn through becoming, not because insect life was superior to his, but precisely because it was inferior. Only through descendant, only through experience, could man learn what was beneath him. All analogies soft, but, in a similar way, the second person of the Trinity retained his divine knowledge infused by reducing himself to a man and learning about the life of man, doing man work, and dying from a death of the 'man. From this self emptying,

Theological speculates church tradition that one of the reasons the bad angels may have rebelled against God was envy. They may have discovered that God chose to become man, instead of the highest form of an angel. This envy would have been directed to the Virgin Mary, thus, such a ship of Honor and Ark of the Covenant which carried the divine choice. God made himself not only man, we must remember, but he did it through a human being, the one prepared by his conception to be perfect. March 25 is one of only two days of the year in which we kneel at the recitation of the Creed in the Mass. At the words "... through the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man" all the bow heads and all the knees bend the wonder of it. If the story of Christ is the greatest story ever told, today is its front page.

PRAYER

O Holy Virgin Mary, we ask for your intercession to make us generous as it is to accept the will of God in our life, especially when this will is expressed in mysterious ways. May you be our example of a generous response to what God wants from us.