“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.
How? Well by grace, understood in a number of ways, one of which is the doctrine of the immaculate conception, a non-biblical doctrine but one which draws upon the suggestive power of a number of biblical passages. This doctrine suggests that Mary’s own conception was immaculate – without the taint and stain of original sin – so that as Donne puts it in a singularly complex poem, God “yields himself to lie/ In prison, in thy womb; and though he there/ Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet he ‘will wear/ Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try.” He is alluding to the doctrine of the immaculate conception which developed over the centuries before being promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church in 1854 as Catholic dogma. She who “conceives” Christ is in turn “conceived” in the mind of God who is her Son and brother; “ere by the spheres time was created, thou was in his mind.”
Apart from the legend of Joachim and Anna at the golden gate in Jerusalem as the occasion for her immaculate conception, there are other arguments such as the later idea of the retroactive application of grace that makes Mary pure and without sin. Regardless it is all by grace. As Irenaeus wonderfully puts it, Christ is “that pure one” who, “opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” It is the connection to Jesus Christ that is critical. The Anglican Divines of the 17thcentury celebrate the purity of Mary because of the purity of Christ . Only as pure can he freely bear the impurities of our sins which make us less than ourselves, less than fully human. Only as pure can he restore us to the truth of ourselves in God. Only as pure can he show us the Father and show us to the Father.
Her pure openness to the will of God is not a matter of passivity but signals true humanity’s active engagement with God. This is particularly significant for an understanding of the idea of conception. Lancelot Andrewes captures the doctrinal significance of the conception. Conception is neither reception nor deception. For Mary, “to conceive is more than to receive. It is so to receive as we yield somewhat of our own also. A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? Because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The Blessed Virgin … [gave] of her own substance.” Nor is it a kind of docetic deception. This is the point of the Proper Preface for Christmas and the Annunciation . Christ, “was made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin, to make us clean from all sin.”
It means being defined by the theological Word which engages the discourse of our own world and day without simply being collapsed into it. Otherwise it is not the Word. Such are the challenges for contemporary Christianity. Corporately and individually, through her “whom no man can honour too much that makes her not God,” as John Donne puts it, we may discover again the essential Marian qualities of the Church, namely, our being with Christ through our active attentiveness to his Word proclaimed and his Sacraments celebrated.
For then, we, too, shall be highly favoured, and never “at any time more fully than in the blessed Sacrament to which we are now a-going”, as Mark Frank so eloquently puts it.
There he is strangely with us, highly favours us, exceedingly blesses us; there we are all made blessed Marys, and become mothers, sisters, and brothers of our Lord, whilst we hear his word, and conceive it in us; whilst we believe him who is the Word, and receive him too into us.
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Annunciation (Transf.) April 9th, 2018