Sermon for the Annunciation
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
This text has carried us through Holy Week and Easter beginning with Palm Sunday . March 25th was Palm Sunday but that date is The Feast of the Annunciation , a feast of great significance for our understanding of the Christian Faith. It marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary through her ‘yes’ to God in response to the Angelic Salutation: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee” and that she “shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a Son, and shalt call his name Jesus.”
Nine months later, we celebrate Christ’s nativity, his birth at Bethlehem. But the conjunction of the Annunciation with Christ’s Passion is immensely significant and reminds us of the inescapable connection between Christmas and Easter , for his “Christmas Day and Good Friday are but the morning and the evening of one and the same day,” as John Donne notes, even as we have noted that Easter Day and The Octave Day of Easter , yesterday, are but the morning and the evening of one and the same day, the day of Resurrection.
But why the Annunciation on the Tuesday after Easter Week? Because the Passion and the Resurrection take utter priority. The Annunciation is for the sake of the Passion and the Resurrection; the meaning of the Incarnation is fully realised in the events that belong to the redemption of our humanity. As Luther, the father of Protestantism, and as Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, both understand, it is per Mariam ad Jesum , through Mary to Jesus. “Mary,” says Luther, “does not want us to come to Mary but through her to Jesus Christ.”
This brings us to the critical and important role of Mary in the work of human redemption. In contrast to Jesus as “just as man” in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, Mary is at once just a woman and more than just a woman. She is the very exemplar and embodiment of our humanity considered in and of itself in its truth and purity. Why? And How? Why? Because of the logic of salvation. Christ cannot be the redeemer of humanity, wounded and broken as a result of sin, if he himself is a sinner. He becomes sin for us only by becoming fully human through the body he assumes from Mary. He does so to free us from all sin and all death. He is “like us in all respects save sin.” Sin after all is privative, a negative; it makes us less than ourselves. She, by extension, too, is understand in a number of theological traditions to be without sin for the sake of Christ’s pure humanity without which he cannot be our redeemer.