The Annunciation

In the Middle Ages, most European countries dated the start of the new year, not on January 1st, but on March 25th. Why? Because on that day, the most momentous event in human history happened. The Angel Gabriel bowed to a Jewish teenage girl, and she agreed to bear God's son. We don't know actually the exact date, of course. But we know that it happened, and that nine months later, God's Son was born into the world. We don't know for sure which came first, March 25th or December 25th. But within the first few hundred years after Christ, the Church had fixed March 25th as the date to celebrate the conception of God's Son in Mary's womb, and his birth nine months later on Dec. 25.

Even in the midst of Lent, the Church proclaims "Alleluia." For on this day; God who is beyond all human thought, sense and material, takes on human flesh and becomes a microscopic embryo. For many, this is a stumbling block. If God is infinite and truly beyond all things, how can God be subject to the limits of finite time? How can God be subject to the limits of a particular place and a particular people?

And if that isn't scandalous enough for you ("Scandal" originally meant "stumbling block); then how about God sending an angel to beg at the feet of a poor teenage girl, and waits for her answer. Did God know what her answer would be? Had he been searching Judea and Galilee for the girl whom God knew would say yes? Or did God have to wait on Mary just as Gabriel did? We do know that Mary was not ordered to bear God's Son. She was offered the enormous call, with no promises that everything would be alright. God offered, and waited for her to answer on her own.

Would Mary have said, "Let it happen to me as you say," if she had known that one day she would hold her dead son after having watched him die on a cross? Do any of us really want to know the future for our children? We are asked to embrace the gift of life not knowing whether, on some days, we will wonder how much of a gift it was. Mary was no different than us. But she certainly knew the risk to herself of carrying a child out of wedlock. She could probably guess from the stories of the Old Testament prophets the opposition sure to come against God's messengers. But she trusted that God would lead her and her son through whatever darkness would come.

And so, just as we ask the saints around us to pray for us, so we also ask: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen"