LENT OR GESIMAS · 25 MARCH
The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Principal Feast · Lady Day · The Incarnation Begins · Nine Months Before Christmas
Annunciation — ah-nun-see-AY-shun · Gabriel — GAY-bree-el · Magnificat — mag-NIF-ih-kat · Nazareth — NAZ-ah-reth · fiat — FEE-at · theotokos — thee-OH-tok-os
We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that, as we have known the Incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an Angel, so by his Cross and Passion we may be brought unto the glory of his Resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
On the twenty-fifth day of March, nine months before Christmas, in the city of Nazareth (NAZ-ah-reth) in Galilee, the angel Gabriel (GAY-bree-el) was sent from God to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. He said to her: Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. And she was troubled, and could not understand what this greeting might mean. And the angel said: Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest. And Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her. In that moment — in Mary’s fiat (FEE-at), her word of consent, her total surrender to the will of God — the eternal Word of God took flesh in her womb. The Incarnation did not begin in the stable at Bethlehem; it began in a room in Nazareth, in a girl’s yes to an angel’s announcement, in the moment when the second person of the Trinity entered human nature and became, as Cyril of Alexandria would insist three centuries later, truly and indivisibly God and man in one undivided person.
The feast falls on 25 March, which is nine months exactly before 25 December — a precision that the ancient Church maintained with great theological deliberateness. Christmas is not arbitrary; it is the birth that follows exactly from the Annunciation, as every birth follows from every conception. The calendar architecture declares that the Incarnation is a fully human process as well as a divine miracle: the Word takes flesh in the ordinary biological time of human gestation, nine months in the womb of Mary, growing as every human child grows, before being born in the poverty of Bethlehem. This is what the Council of Ephesus’s declaration of Mary as Theotokos (thee-OH-tok-os) — God-bearer — insists: not merely that Jesus was a holy man in whom God dwelt, but that the one in Mary’s womb from 25 March to 25 December was fully and truly God from the moment of conception. The feast of the Annunciation therefore contains the whole of Christology: the eternal Son of God, in the moment of Mary’s consent, becomes what he was not before — not less God but also truly and fully man, for our salvation.
The feast most often falls in Lent — the season of penitence and preparation — and the juxtaposition is intentional and profound. Lent moves toward the cross; the Annunciation is the beginning of the journey that leads to the cross, the first movement of the same obedience that will culminate in Gethsemane and Calvary. Mary’s fiat and Jesus’s not my will but thine be done are the same word spoken at opposite ends of the incarnate life — the same total surrender to the Father’s will, the same willingness to bear whatever the will of God requires, the same love that will not flinch. The ancient Church saw in the Annunciation the second Eve undoing what the first Eve had done: where Eve said I will, Mary said be it unto me; where Eve’s will asserted itself against God’s, Mary’s will dissolved into God’s. This is the theological heart of the feast — not a merely biological event but the moment in which human will and divine will are perfectly aligned, the moment in which the Redemption begins, not on the cross but in a girl’s yes in a room in Nazareth.
The Annunciation is also the feast of divine patience with human freedom. God does not compel Mary. The angel announces and waits. Mary is troubled and asks her question — How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? — and the angel answers, and she consents. The whole of the mystery hangs on the free consent of a young woman in Nazareth, and God waits for it. This is the most extraordinary thing in the Gospel: that the Incarnation required the cooperation of a human being, and that God sought her consent rather than overriding her will. It is the pattern of all grace: never compelled, always offered, always waiting for the human yes that completes it. Mary’s fiat is the model of all prayer, all faith, all response to God — the moment when the self steps aside and says be it unto me according to thy word, and in that stepping aside, the Word takes flesh again in the soul that has made room for him. The feast falls in the middle of Lent — in the preparation, in the waiting, in the season of the penitent heart making room — and it is perfectly placed: the great yes of Mary, the beginning of salvation, set in the season when every Christian is called to make the same act of consent that she made in Nazareth.
O God of infinite patience and infinite love, who didst await the consent of a virgin in Nazareth before thy Word took flesh in her womb; Grant that we may, like Mary, receive the announcement of thy will with humility and trust, and, like her, say our fiat to all that thou requirest of us, knowing that when the soul steps aside and makes room for thee, the Incarnation is accomplished anew in every willing heart; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.