The Annunciation and the Gospel of Life, Solemnity of the Annunciation, March 25, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Solemnity of the Annunciation
March 25, 2020
Is 7:10-14.8:10, Ps 40, Heb 10:4-10, Lk 1:26-38

To listen to an audio recording of today’s Mass, please click below:

The following points were pondered at Mass. 

• Today we mark the most important event in human history, the time when, out of love for us and to save us, God himself became one of us in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Everything Jesus would later do flows from this event, which should never cease to fill us with wonder. And this incarnation is not just a one-time event in the distant past, but a continual reality. God-with-us is still with us, most especially in the enduring incarnation of the Holy Eucharist. He’s with us during this time of the coronavirus. He’s with us on our happiest days and saddest. He’s with us always until the end of time, just as he promised.
• We meditate on this central event three times a day in the prayer of the Angelus, so that we can ponder how God is with us each day and so that we can similarly ponder Mary’s response to God’s desire to enter our life and establish his kingdom. A good way to mark this feast is to ponder the three antiphons and collect of the prayer that we pray each day in the Angelus, based on the first word of the prayer, Angelus. We can also nourish our reflections with the words of St. John Paul II in his great encyclical on the Gospel of Life, published 25 years ago today, Evangelium Vitae.
• Let’s begin with the third antiphon. “The Word became flesh … and dwelled among us.” The Eternal Word of God, who is (not was) with the Father and the Holy Spirit from the beginning, today took on our nature dwelling among us and within us. Isaiah on behalf of God had asked Ahaz for a sign, as we see in today’s first reading, but the sign given was so much more than a “virgin shall conceive and bear a son” who would be named Emmanuel or God-with-us. Neither Ahaz nor any one else would have ever fathomed that God himself would take on human nature in order to rescue us and lead us on the path to salvation. Jesus took on all of our human nature — not just human flesh but a human soul (or as St. Paul would have it, a human soul and spirit) as well — in order to give it for us. That’s what the Letter to the Hebrews and the Responsorial Psalm help us to ponder. “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me,” Hebrews tells us. Jesus did all of this, the Letter continues, in order to accomplish the Father’s will to redeem us and restore us to communion with him. “Behold, I come to do your will,” Jesus was saying with body language as he entered the human race he created, and “by this ‘will,’ we have been consecrated through the offering of the Body of Jesus Christ once for all.” The Psalm helps us to enter more deeply into that mystery of the Incarnation, which is fundamentally one of faithful loving obedience to right the wrong of the disobedience of sin. “Sacrifice or oblation you wished not, but ears open to obedience you gave me. Holocausts or sin-offerings you sought not; then said I, ‘Behold I come.’” Jesus had come to obey and to show us the way to hear God and lovingly obey. We enter the mystery of the Incarnation morally through faithful adherence to God. And that is a path of joy. St. John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae said that the purpose of the incarnation was ultimately that we might have life to the full. He wrote at the beginning of that great encyclical, “The Gospel of life is at the heart of Jesus’ message. Lovingly received day after day by the Church, it is to be preached with dauntless fidelity as ‘good news’ to the people of every age and culture. … When he presents the heart of his redemptive mission, Jesus says: ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (Jn 10:10). In truth, he is referring to that ‘new’ and ‘eternal’ life which consists in communion with the Father, to which every person is freely called in the Son by the power of the Sanctifying Spirit. It is precisely in this ‘life’ that all the aspects and stages of human life achieve their full significance.” And he said that this mystery of life all flows from the “Birth of a Child” which is proclaimed as “good news of great joy that will come to all the people,” a mystery that “reveals the full meaning of every human birth” and life. The Word of Life, of Joy, of Truth, has become flesh and dwells among us! 
• That brings us to the second antiphon of the Angelus. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. … Let it be done to me according to your word.” The great Solemnity of the Incarnation we mark today wasn’t exclusively God’s work. By God’s own design, it also was totally dependent on human cooperation. And we see and rejoice in that total cooperation by the Immaculate Virgin Mary, who because she had never known sin was able to get a totally free and full response to God’s will to redeem the human race. She was willing to allow her entire life to develop according to God’s plan. Her adhesion to God through his word was so strong that that Word would take on her own flesh, not only in her womb but in her entire life. In response to the Archangel Gabriel’s calling her kecharitomene, “You who have been filled with grace,” she humbly referred to herself as, “The handmaid of the Lord.” To be full of grace — full of God — means, like the Son whom she conceived, to be fully at God’s service. Her body, soul and spirit were likewise fully and freely at God’s disposal. Her response to God’s word, God’s will, God’s plans are obviously given to us each day by the Church as a model for our own. St. John Paul II pondered the importance of this yes of Mary in Evangelium Vitae and said that Mary is the model of how we should welcome God and all life and therefore the model for the spiritual motherhood of the Church. He wrote, “The one who accepted ‘Life’ in the name of all and for the sake of all was Mary, the Virgin Mother. … Mary’s consent at the Annunciation and her motherhood stand at the very beginning of the mystery of life which Christ came to bestow on humanity (cf. Jn 10:10).Through her acceptance and loving care for the life of the Incarnate Word, human life has been rescued from condemnation to final and eternal death. For this reason, Mary, like the Church of which she is the type, is a mother of all who are reborn to life. She is in fact the mother of the Life by which everyone lives,and when she brought it forth from herself she in some way brought to rebirth all those who were to live by that Life. As the Church contemplates Mary’s motherhood, she discovers the meaning of her own motherhood and the way in which she is called to express it. At the same time, the Church’s experience of motherhood leads to a most profound understanding of Mary’s experience as the incomparable model of how life should be welcomed and cared for.”
• We come now to the first antiphon, “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary … and she conceived by the Holy Spirit,” which points to the absolute wonder we should have at this day. We mark an incredible miracle and truth of faith. Jesus wasn’t conceived in the order of natural human generation but by a miraculous intervention of God’s grace. This is what’s contained in Mary’s question in the Gospel for today’s Mass. After the Archangel tells her that she will conceive and bear a son, she asks, “How can this be for I do [or better in Hebrew, will] not know man?” Such a question would make no sense if Mary had been planning to consummate her marriage with St. Joseph, since then she well would have known how she would conceive in her womb and bear a son. Her question points to the fact that she had already consecrated herself as a virgin to God and that if she was to conceive a son, either she would need to break that commitment or God would have to intervene. God did intervene. The Holy Spirit overshadowed her and she conceived with his help Jesus, who on the one hand came from her flesh, but on the other came also by a new creation on the part of God (from which Jesus got his other 23 chromosomes, including his Y). We rejoice in that overshadowing today and ask the Lord to increase our wonder at his miraculous intervention. This miracle leads us to have confidence in all that God does. That’s how St. John Paul II finishes his reflections toward the end of Evangelium Vitae: “The angel’s Annunciation to Mary is framed by these reassuring words: ‘Do not be afraid, Mary’ and ‘with God nothing will be impossible’ (Lk 1:30, 37). The whole of the Virgin Mother’s life is in fact pervaded by the certainty that God is near to her and that he accompanies her with his providential care.” That’s meant to teach us to have similar confidence. This is a particularly important thought as together we confront the coronavirus. Pope Francis mentioned this courage in his Wednesday audience this morning, in which he said, “This message, like any Gospel proclamation, must be given first of all in witness. I call to mind with gratitude the silent testimony of many people who, in different ways, are doing their utmost to serve the sick, the elderly, those who are lonely and most destitute. They put the Gospel of life into practice, like Mary who, having accepted the angel’s announcement, went to help her cousin Elizabeth who needed it. … The message of the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae is more relevant than ever. Beyond emergencies, such as the one we are experiencing, it is a question of acting on a cultural and educational level to transmit to future generations the attitude of solidarity, care, hospitality, knowing full well that the culture of life is not an exclusive heritage of Christians, but belongs to all those who, … recognize the value of each person, even when he is fragile and suffering. Every human life, unique and unrepeatable, … constitutes an invaluable value. This must be announced ever again, with the courage of words and of actions. This calls for solidarity and fraternal love for the great human family and for each of its members. Therefore, with St. John Paul II, I reaffirm with renewed conviction the appeal he made to all twenty-five years ago: “Respect, defend, love and serve life, every life, every human life!”
• All of this brings us finally to the way that this Mystery endures. The same Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary in Nazareth and throughout her life comes now to overshadow this altar and all of us in a double epiclesis. First, he comes to work just as great a miracle as Jesus’ virginal conception, totally changing bread and wine into his body, blood, soul and divinity. Then he wants to overshadow all of us and through our communion with the Word-made-flesh transform us into one body, one spirit in Christ. This is the whole purpose of the incarnation. We pray at the end of the Angelus, “Pour forth we beseech you, O Lord, your grace into our hearts, that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an Angel, may by his Passion and Cross, be brought to the glory of the Resurrection.” That’s not a prayer just for the future, but for the present, as we enter into Jesus’ risen life through Communion. The Opening Prayer of the Mass ponders this reality: “O God, who willed that your Word should take on the reality of human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, grant we pray, that we, who confess our Redeemer to be God and man, may merit to become partakers even in his divine nature.” And all of this happens through the miraculous exchange that happens at Mass, which is highlighted by the prayer the priest says when he mixes a drop of water symbolizing our humanity with the wine that points to Christ’s divinity. “Through the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Him who humbled himself to share our humanity.” The Solemnity of the Annunciation is meant to divinize us, to unite us with the Word made flesh so that, like Mary, our entire life may develop in accordance with Christ’s word, so that in our own body, we might say to the Lord, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me” and “Behold, I come to do your will.” It is so that we, in Christ, with Mary, might have life to the full! May we, through our living in this ongoing greatest event in human mystery, become in turn an Angelus for the world, bringing others, like the Archangel Gabriel brought Mary, to enter into this great mystery of the depth of God’s love!

The readings for today’s Mass were: