Annunciation of the Lord

Nine months before Christmas, the Church celebrates the moment the Gospel of Luke places at the center of history. Gabriel is sent to a virgin in Nazareth, betrothed to Joseph. He calls her full of grace. She is troubled. He says she will conceive and bear a son named Jesus, who will reign on David’s throne. She asks how this can be, since she does not know man. The answer is not an explanation of biology. The Holy Spirit will come upon her, and the power of the Most High will overshadow her, the same verb the Old Testament uses for the glory filling the tabernacle. The child will be called holy, the Son of God. Mary says: Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word.

The solemnity is of the Lord, not only of Mary. The Word becomes flesh at her consent. St. Irenaeus already set her fiat against Eve’s disobedience. Later theology will say that the Incarnation is the union of the divine nature and a human nature in the one Person of the Son, without confusion and without division, which is the language of Chalcedon. None of that is a March 25 invention. It is the Church refusing to let Luke’s scene collapse into a story about a virtuous girl. God the Son assumes a human nature from her, body and soul, at the instant she consents. Christmas is the birth. This is the conception.

March 25 is also, in an old Christian calculation, the date long associated with the crucifixion and even with the first day of creation. The medieval mind liked the symmetry: the same day the world was made, the same day it was redeemed, the same day the Redeemer was conceived. The liturgy no longer depends on that symmetry, but it explains why the date sits so close to Passiontide in many years. When March 25 falls inside Holy Week or the octave of Easter, the solemnity is transferred to the Monday after the Second Sunday of Easter. The Annunciation is never omitted. It is moved so that it is not swallowed by the Triduum.

In the United States the day is not a holy day of obligation. It is still a solemnity: Gloria, Creed, white vestments, and, if it falls in Lent, the Alleluia is still not said. The Lenten discipline of the Alleluia yields only at the Easter Vigil. The collect of the day asks that we who confess Jesus as true God and true man may, by the power of his resurrection, deserve to come to eternal joy. The prayer already looks from Nazareth to the empty tomb.

The Gospel is Luke 1:26–38. Isaiah 7, the virgin shall conceive, is the classic first reading, heard with the Church’s caution that Matthew applies the prophecy to the virginal conception. Hebrews 10, “a body you prepared for me,” is the second reading in the current lectionary: the Son enters the world to do the Father’s will. The Angelus, prayed morning, noon, and evening, is this Gospel in miniature. On this solemnity it is more than a habit.