Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you...Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of the his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end....The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God....For nothing will be impossible with God. (Luke 1:30-33,35,37 NRSV)
Today is the day when we can see the full spectrum of our salvation. We look ahead to Good Friday when we remember our Lord's death, and we even glance beyond Good Friday longingly looking toward Easter Sunday, the feast of feasts, when we celebrate our Lords glorious resurrection. We look ahead like this today as we think of the angel's visitation to the Virgin. We recognize today, maybe more fully than at any other point, that our Lord came as a child to die and rise again for us and for our salvation.
The Lord and maker of the heavens, he who is uncontainable humbled himself so much that he allowed himself to take on flesh and to be contained in a womb. He who knows the expanse of the universe and who spoke to the darkness at creation is the same incarnate word that came and took on flesh as a fetus (if such an impersonal word can be used). We celebrate this day the incorporeal Son, the second person of the Trinity, taking on flesh so that humanity may be united to God. We rejoice in the fact that Christ our God took on every part of what it means to be human and yet was without sin. Our Lord took upon himself not only our flesh, but also our will - assuming everything that is intrinsic to us, for as St. Basil states: "that which was not assumed cannot be redeemed."
Today we also remember Mary's response to the Angel: "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word" (Luke 1:38). We remember that her response was a free choice and that it was not forced upon her. In this same way we remember that we are called to emulate her and to respond to God daily with the same words. Theotokos, the God-bearer, that is the title given to Mary by the early church, not as a sign of her exultation but to proclaim the mystery we celebrate today that God himself, in the person of the Son chose to be born. The uncreated one who is without beginning chose to unite himself to humanity so thoroughly that we can say with confidence that Mary bore God in her womb. To say this statement is hard and absurd is true, and yet it is also beautiful in the truth it proclaims. Christ is the fullness of God, and yet also the fullness of humanity and today we proclaim his love. We can see this love clearly as we remember his incarnation and look toward the cross and resurrection.
Glory to God in the Highest! Our redemption is at hand, for Christ our God is conceived in the womb of the virgin so that he may cleanse us from our sin.
Sadly this holy-day is forgotten in most of Protestantism probably due to a number of reasons, chief of which may be (and I'm just offering a hypothesis here) connected to the staunch rejection of anything having to do with the Virgin Mary at the time of Luther's reformation. I believe it would do us well to remember this day with our Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters. I believe this feast helps us to think more accurately about the incarnation of our Lord. It helps us to avoid the heresy of adoptionism and some gnostic tendencies that run deep in some of our traditions.
So let us today join with our Catholic and Orthodox friends and boldly sing the praises of God. For today we can see both the incarnation and the crucifixion/resurrection clearly. Let us praise God for his redemption of humanity for today we celebrate the coming of grace as the Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin!
No comments:
Post a Comment