Sermon for the Feast of the Annunciation

admin | 25 March 2020

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Is this a kind of fatalism? An acquiescence to ‘the way things are’ or are ‘going to be’? That might be how we feel in a time of isolation and virtual lock-down. It might seem that all and every kind of agency that belongs to human dignity is being taken away and we are trapped.

And while there are many, many uncertainties, and no end of fears and worries that are part of our current experience in the face of the Covid-19 outbreak, including how authorities deal or don’t deal with it, Mary’s words are not about a lack of agency or a kind of fatalism. They are more about an active willing of God’s will or Providence and as such belong to human freedom, agency, and accountability. They belong, in other words to what it properly means to be human which is not about manipulation, not about being reduced to machines, to automatons and bots, but about responsibility and agency. Mary’s words define our humanity and remind us that without God we are radically incomplete.

Mary’s Annunciation falls this year within the range of mid-Lent, a complement at once to the week following ‘Mothering Sunday,’ ‘Laetare’ or Rejoicing Sunday, as the Fourth Sunday in Lent is often called, as well as belonging to the essential orientation of the Lenten Journey that brings us to the Passion of Christ. Simply put, her fiat mihi, her “be it unto me according to thy word” anticipates and participates in what will be Christ’s great word of prayer in Gethsemane and his prayers to the Father on the Cross. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” “I have come,” Jesus says, “to do the will of him who sent me.” He is defined by his eternal and essential orientation to the Father. As Mary shows, that orientation also belongs to the essential meaning of the truth of our humanity. In other words, Mary shows us exactly what it means to be truly and purely human. “Thy will be done.”

And that has entirely to do with the orientation of our lives to God, exactly what the Lenten journey concentrates for us. The whole of our life is to God. Mary’s ‘yes’ to God shows us the true nature of the interplay between God and man without which our lives are radically incomplete. Note what she says, here: “according to thy word,” according to the divine word announced to her on the wings of an Angel. Her ‘yes’ marks the moment in time of God being with us. Her ‘yes’ to God is the moment of Christ’s human conception in her womb. She conceives intellectually and spiritually through willing the divine purpose and will that is announced to her. The joy and the wonder of this may seem to eclipse all of the struggles and trials of Lent until we remember the purpose of his coming. It is all joy and wonder but not without the intense realization of human sin and evil, of suffering and death, which the Cross reveals to us and to her. “A sword shall pierce through thine own soul also,” as Simeon reminds her.

Christ’s incarnation means that he has from her what makes his suffering and death possible, on the one hand, and what overcomes them, on the other hand. He takes his humanity from her so that he can suffer for us what belongs to our sin and death. For he takes from her our pure humanity so that he can will to suffer all that belongs to our deceit and sin, our suffering and sorrow, our dying and our death, and to do so freely and simply out of love. Mary’s Annunciation connects completely and essentially to Christ’s Passion. The joy of her Annunciation is not eclipsed by the sorrows of Christ; his sorrows and sufferings for us through her become our joy.

And all for the same simple reason: her affirmation of God as truth. She wills to will what God wills for us. That is salvation. As the poet, John Donne puts it, in a sonnet entitled ‘Annunciation,’ itself a marvellous whirlwind of the paradoxes of relationship, “salvation to all that will is nigh.” The whole point is about our willing what God wills for us. It is the burden and meaning of the Lord’s Prayer: “thy will be done.” And so Mary says, “be it unto me according to thy word;” it is her active yielding to God’s will.

It begins and ends in Mary. Where she is there is Christ also since he is for us only through her. The God, who “cannot die” and “cannot sin,” takes our humanity from her so that he can embrace and endure our sin and our death; he “cannot choose but die;” “cannot sinne, yet all sinnes must beare.” Her ‘yes’ to God complements every word on the Cross. God “yields himself to lye in prison, in thy womb” even as Christ yields himself to the Cross for us and for our salvation. “Be it unto me,” she says; “it is finished,” he says. Each word complements and completes the other. It is all God’s will and yet only God’s will through what belongs to our humanity; in short, through Mary. Such is our wholeness, our completeness, our salvation. She is the theotokos, the bearer of God, the one through whom God is made man. “Whom thou conceiv’st, conceiv’d; yea, thou art now Thy Makers maker.” She conceives Christ in her womb at the Annunciation but she is herself conceived in the mind of God before the foundations of the world; in short, from all eternity. Such is God’s Providence, his will for our good.

The paradoxes are just so great. Donne plays on the word ‘all’ at the outset of the sonnet. All means everyone who wills in the first line but then he brings out all of the possible changes on the little word all. “That All, which alwayes is All every where,” meaning God in his omnipotence, his ubiquity, his eternity. Such is the paradox of now and then, of time and eternity, as gathered into the eternal now of God. The relation of Mary to Christ in the will of God is also the ground of her relation to us and our relation to one another through her. Christ is at once her “Son and Brother,” one with us because of his birth through her. And what seems to be a prison, like our current isolation and separation from one another, is something more and greater. “Thou hast light in darke, and shuttst in little roome, Immensity cloistered in thy deare wombe.” Such is the wonder and the mystery, the joy of her Annunciation in the midst of the trials of Lent, and in the midst of our current trials.

To attend to the mystery of the Annunciation is to attend to the mystery of God with us precisely in the circumstances of our lives. It is to find an inner freedom, an inner activity of the will. It is to discover the truth of our humanity. It is found in God’s eternal will and in our willingness to will that will, like Mary, in our lives.