Let your yes mean yes/no

In the shadow of today's holy feast, we can only sit and wonder at the endless mystery of God's mercy - and He that might the vantage best have took / Found out the remedy (as Shakespeare puts it). All the excitement of the Exsultet during the Easter Vigil is ours (and the angelic host's) again. The Eternal Father intervenes to interrupt the murderous course of human history and lays down the foundations of the bridge that can lead us back towards salvation. This is the Lord's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.

And in the midst of it all is this quiet figure of the Virgin Mary who will rise from the grimy obscurity of a troubled Roman province of the Late Iron Age - more troubled now than it ever has been - to be recognised and honoured in churches and hearts on every continent as the Mother of the Redeemer. 

Every Colwelian wants to echo Mary's 'yes' today. What today's gospel gives us, however, are the conditions of that 'yes' or rather its gravitational centre. The paradox is that our total 'yes' is a 'yes' that, unlike Mary's, includes a kind of 'no'. 

After all, how will the fulfilment of Gabriel's message come about? As we reread this passage of St Luke's gospel, we note one thing; it will come about primarily through the action of God: 'the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow.' If Gabriel is asking for Mary's 'yes', it is only implicit: he knows she will say 'yes'. God's foreknowledge of her 'yes' does not mean she has no choice; the man who proposes to a woman who totally loves him knows she will say 'yes' freely. Moreover, she does not need to say a coquettish 'no' to prove she is free. Without taking anything away from Mary's freedom, therefore, we can say there is no way in which this creature who belonged totally to God would have said 'no' to such a plan.

Yet more than that, neither was there any way in which Mary would have imagined that her 'yes' was sufficient. She is the one who is not, He is the One who Is. Jesus needs to tell St Catherine of Sienna that but no need to tell Mary whose very soul is consumed by such an awareness of the Most High. So, when she says 'yes', there is no shadow of a 'no' in her reply; for there has never been sin. She is immaculate from her conception. Every dynamic, every movement of her heart, soul and body is a longing for the Lord and to be satisfied only in Him.

Not so her children by grace. As we want to echo her 'yes', we owe it to God to recognise the same insufficiency, and yet we struggle to: we do not have Mary's freedom. In this sense, it is not enough for us to say 'yes' to Him; we cannot echo Mary's 'yes', although we can emulate it. Our 'yes' must be underpinned constantly by the necessary confession of the truth of our dependence on God - a truth Mary never denied but one which we baulk at with every unconscious urge and often some conscious ones. And the corollary of this confession is to affirm our insufficiency. He is the One, not us, and our being and sufficiency can only be His gift to us.

Thy will be done not only means Thy will but also through through Thy means and by Thy grace. It is not just that we must do this Will. We must also ask the means to do this Will; to beg, as the French writer Fabrice Hadjadj says, our very voices from God to announce His praise, to cooperate in His work, and even and perhaps above all, to long for Him. 

And all the while, we must say 'no' - a NO by God's grace of course! - to the incipient rebellion that shakes our being since the Fall and creeps back again and again into the most intimate enclave of our heart to sit in God's place at its centre. How often we ambush ourselves with our own self-sufficiency! Again, paradoxically, we are not at our freest when we take command and act as if we can solve all our challenges, but when we surrender this inner throne to the One who made us and works out our salvation. This is what it means to be anawim - little ones - of the Lord. 

Then, and only then, can we echo Mary's coda: behold the servants of the Lord, be it done to us according to God's word.