for March 25
Feast of the Annunciation

Today is the feast of the Annunciation. The angel greets Mary and induces her to accept her role as the mother of Jesus. It’s March 25^th, exactly nine months till Christmas, the scheduling of the feast a kind of liturgical bow to a woman’s experience of pregnancy.

There are two closely related ways to pray on this feast. One is to reflect upon the Incarnation, the entry of the Son of God into human history when the Word became flesh, as the fourth gospel expresses it. This is more or less the spirit of the first two scriptural readings. The other way to pray on this feast day is to contemplate Mary, her response to the divine invitation and the influence that decision had on the rest of her life. And this is the spirit of Luke’s gospel.

Last week we were reminded that St. Joseph plays a central role in Matthew’s gospel in the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth. On this feast we are reminded that Mary of Nazareth is given a similarly central role in Luke’s gospel. But that’s it. After Luke recounts the infancy narrative, Mary is mentioned only sparingly in his gospel and in the rest of the synoptic tradition. John’s gospel puts Mary at Cana for Jesus’ first sign and most significantly at the foot of the cross. But maybe the long tradition of Marian devotion would have been spared some theological indiscretions if the Church had followed more closely Luke’s way of appreciating who she was, the role she plays and what she has to teach us.

So how does Luke’s gospel present Mary of Nazareth to us on this day that our prayer can transform into a Marian feast?

Personally, I feel attracted to approaching Mary this way because her portrait is so relevant to our present circumstances. Luke describes Mary as a character stepping out of the Old Testament. There is a long tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures of God’s special relationship with a segment of Israel called the “poor in spirit,” in Hebrew, the anawim. Jesus himself invoked this tradition in his first beatitude when he conferred the title “blessed” on the poor in spirit. They are the faithful remnant who remain always steadfast, loyal to the covenant. They know that nothing can save them but God’s covenantal love and mercy. So they are utterly dependent on the Lord. Great writer that he was, Luke conveys this insight into Mary by invoking some sophisticated coded language, biblical imagery that Luke’s intended audience would have caught immediately: a miraculous birth, the barren woman theme exhibited in the person of Elizabeth, Mary’s response of utter openness to the Lord’s command despite acknowledging her human limitations. Luke connects Mary to these Old Testament themes most obviously later in the story in the Magnificat prayer when Mary uses the words of Anna, the mother of Samuel, to sing her song of great praise.

So why is all this relevant to our present circumstances, as we struggle to contend with a world that has suddenly become so unbelievably ominous? Right now, like it or not, we are all getting a call to acknowledge our poverty before the Lord, the inadequacy of human resources that we thought made us secure and impregnable. I’m not suggesting that we should all give up and lie down in the middle of the street. We certainly have to utilize every resource we have to get ourselves–and especially the most needy–out of this mess. But ultimately, we are being challenged to embrace a wisdom that Mary acknowledged when she made herself completely open to grace and utterly dependent on God to fill up her emptiness.

You get the gist. The sentiments have been expressed and recommended to us a thousand times before. But now for us, as citizens of an affluent land and surrounded by modern technology, the world is collapsing and revealing to us a truth that we can no longer duck. We are all empty unless we allow the Lord’s grace to fill us with his abiding presence, his mercy and his strength. We are called to be numbered among the anawim.
–Walter F. Modrys SJ

Today’s readings are available on the US Catholic Conference of Bishops’ website.