The Annunciation

Ps 2: "Come, let us break their fetters; come, let us cast off their yoke."

This is still the outcry of the world against the Lord, misunderstanding the nature of his yoke. We want to determine our own destiny. Freedom to us means freedom to do whatever we want, and if the Lord tells us that some things are not best for us or for those around us, well, we're best suited to decide what's in our best interest. We don't need some oppressive set of moral restrictions! Nobody else is going to tell us what's right and what's wrong!

This solemnity of the Annunciation should paint a vastly different picture for us of what God is about, what he wants for us, and what he was willing to bear to reach us. The idea of being sinful, of being in need of redemption, doesn't sit well in the modern mind. Even when we've acccepted the idea of God, we've gotten so focused on the aspect of a loving God that we forget why that love is so important to us.

Christ's incarnation and his evenutal sacrificial death are so integral as to be inseparable. Our RCIA group had a rather lengthy discussion, early in the year, regarding whether we are saved by Christ's death or by his life. It is an impossible debate, because they are so intertwined. Had Jesus been put to death as an infant or toddler, along with so many of his peers, wouldn't he still have been the spotless sacrifice? Yet the public ministry that we needed in order to learn to recognize him, then and now, would never have occurred. Though his birth itself fulfilled prophecies, many other prophecies would not have been fulfilled, the church would never have been founded, and countless lives would never have been transformed. (In considering such mysteries, it is good to remember the idea of God existing outside of time, so that the utterance of a prophecy and its fulfillment are simultaneous.) Returning, then, to the aforementioned discussion, in baptism we both die with Christ and come to new life in him, and we cannot have one without the other.

So in the Annunciation, Mary's yes echoes the eternal Son's yes, to leave the throne of heaven and become fully human while remaining fully God. That yes would be reaffirmed in the Garden, and becomes our yes as we ask the Spirit to live within us, allowing Christ himself to shine through us.

"Let it be done to me as you have said."