Sermon for the Eve of the Annunciation
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Mary’s response to the divine will announced to her by the Angel Gabriel is the epitome of the Christian Faith, a firm but emphatic “yes” to God through whom God becomes human. It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ or Christ apart from Mary. She is “the pure source of his pure humanity” (Irenaeus) as ordained from before the foundation of the world; in other words, divinely ordered. She is, in the words of the Chalcedonian Definition of the Council of Ephesus (451), Theotokos, “the Mother of God.” What that means goes to the heart of the understanding of Christ’s Incarnation.
The Annunciation is the moment in time of Christ’s conception. He is made man through “the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, Theotokos, according to his manhood”, his “human nature (κατα την ανθροποτητα),” just as Christ is the eternal Son “begotten of his Father according to his Godhead” (κατα την θεοτητα) (Chalcedonian Definition). She is not the mother of the Godhead, the source of divinity, the maker of God, as it were, for that would negate humanity itself. Mary as Theotokos, literally God-bearer, belongs to the gathering into unity of all of the images about Jesus Christ’s divinity and humanity understood in their mutual integrity and revealed to us in Christ. Mary is the chosen vessel of his becoming human and incarnate, that is to say, in the flesh, while remaining absolutely and eternally God. The maker of God to us, it could be said, in ways that belong only to poetic licence.
The emphasis on Mary as Virgin and Mother is the witness of Scripture and Creed to the essential doctrine of the Incarnation and the Trinity; the two are inseparable. Mary plays an essential role in the economy of salvation and in the life of prayer. Her “yes” to God is the inverse and the overcoming of the sin of Adam and Eve. Ave is, as the Fathers note, the reverse of Eve. But she is not passive or unengaged in the work of human redemption. She “conceived by the Holy Ghost”, as the Apostles’ Creed states, yet, in Luke’s account, the Angel clearly says “thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a Son,” echoing the lesson from Isaiah. She conceived but without the aid of a man. She did not simply receive like a passive vessel, a mere conduit. She is an active agent in the work of human redemption that looks back to creation itself as spoken into existence by God. What comes from God to her is actively embraced and engaged by her. In her “yes” is the proto-evangelium of Genesis fulfilled, a prophecy of the hope and longing for redemption that “her seed shall bruise thy [the serpent’s] head” even as he “shall bruise his heel,”a reference to Christ and his Passion. Nor is this some sort of gnostic deception, a matter of her and our being deceived. Her Annunciation is non recipiet et non decipiet sed concipiet, as Andrewes summarizes.