“God-is-with-us”
Wednesday 25 Mars, Annunciation of the Lord
Isaiah 7:10-14
In the middle of Lent comes this important feast of Our Lady. Important because it links her directly to the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, God becoming a human being. Indeed, Lent makes no sense without an understanding of this basic truth: God stooped down to us in Jesus and shared our lot completely, except for sin. Immanuel is the Hebrew for ‘God-is-with-us'.
Appropriately, given the times we are in, I've just been reading a book, Quarantine by John Crace. It's a fictional account of Jesus' forty days in the desert, though a rather unusual and non-biblical version of it. Jesus dies in the desert in this story without being crucified. But it describes very vividly what it must have felt like to fast for forty days in the arid and unforgiving desert: ‘The tears drained from his sinuses into his throat; that was the moisture he had drunk for thirteen days. His tongue was dry and stiff and silvery…'
The humanity of Jesus cannot be ignored - various heresies have attempted to do so. In God's plan of salvation for the world, he decreed that we would get to know God through Jesus, who is the Way. There is no other avenue of approach. ‘In no other name' will we be saved (Acts 4:12). The world's great religions and some of the world's great literature are all worthy attempts to reach up to God, evidence that our hearts are restless for him even when we do not yet know him fully. But in Jesus God comes down to us.
And for God to come down to us in a truly human way, he had to have a human mother, Mary. She becomes the vehicle for the fulfilment of God's purposes for the salvation of the world. And she does it willingly. God does not force her into becoming the mother of Jesus. Without fully knowing what she was letting herself in for, in faith and trust Mary gives her ‘fiat': ‘let what you have said be done to me'. God's humility is so great that he waits for a young Jewish woman, probably only a teenager, to say ‘yes' to the Incarnation.
Mary's own humanity will then live on in the life of the Church through her approachability as the Mother of God. She's a human mother with whom everyone can identify. Her humanity becomes in a sense elevated as a result of the Incarnation, so that through it Jesus, God, is now no longer a distant and remote figure but her ‘son'. The tenderness of our devotion to Jesus through his mother is made possible through a mother's love, a love we all understand. That's why images of Mary holding the child Jesus in her arms have inspired so many artists and have been the focus of so much prayer. Let us turn to Mary in these difficult times for the world.
A meditation written by Fr Paul Graham O.S.A., Assistant General on the Augustinian Council for Northern Europe, including the Provinces of Ireland, England & Scotland, Poland, Germany, Austria and Slovakia
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