A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 26-38) relates the central mystery
of our charism in COLW – the Annunciation. What is announced is not only the
coming of the Saviour, the Son of the Most High, not only His reign over the
house of Jacob and His everlasting kingdom, but also the mysterious privileges
that underpin the vocation of the Virgin Mary, paving the way for the
restoration of the human race to its original course of friendship with God. Hail,
full of grace, the Lord is with you … Mary, you have found favour with God.
God, who sees all time in one moment, anticipates in this one human creature
the effects of the infinite merits of his Son and gives to her the
extraordinary grace of conceiving a Son by whose grace she too has been saved. We
all enjoy God’s gifts; this privilege was His to her. As she will soon proclaim
to her cousin, her spirit thus rejoices in God her saviour. In Adam all have
sinned; in Christ all have the possibility of redemption. But just as the
original Adam’s fault was prepared by a woman, his companion Eve, so now the
second Adam’s redemption is prepared by a reversal of Eve’s original disobedience
in Mary’s fiat. This “yes”, she chooses freely in her sinless state, just
as Eve freely chose sin in her sinless state; their sinlessness did not take
away free their choice.
This, then, is the favour in which God the Father finds His daughter
Mary: a state now of original harmony. And it is her harmony with Him which
becomes the counterpoint for a new song to the Lord whose melody will be added
by the Son she raises. When we pray in our turn that our lives may become a
song of constant praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, all we do is add another
line, another verse, to this existing harmony that begins through Jesus’ work in Mary’s soul at
her conception. And as she was chosen by Him before the foundation of the
world, so we too find ourselves beneficiaries of a similar election and,
like her, find ourselves called to be holy and blameless, according
to the purpose of His will.
Her mysteries are ours; from her immaculate conception comes
in some sense our conception in grace. For there is no motherhood without begotten
children, and in some way, her immaculate conception not only prepares her to
bear God’s son - painlessly, say the Fathers of the Church - but to bear in a spiritual way His mystical body in the ugly labour
pains of Calvary. For nothing will be impossible with God who reaps
where He did not sow and gathers where He did not scatter and who, in the case
of His Son, has already sent a herald ahead of Him, to prepare His ways and
announce His coming, first in the previously barren womb of John's aged mother
Elizabeth.
And now Mary does not begin her song but adds a new verse
with the Father’s bass and foundation, the grace notes of the Holy Spirit, the melody
of her Son from the depths of her womb, and her own haunting descant, learned in
the holy solitude of her immaculate heart where she had long mediated on the
favours of her maker:
Behold I am the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me
according to your word.
There is no other key in which we can sing. Our new song is
only a variation on the melody and harmony of Mary’s song, the theme tune of the
Mystical Body in which reverberates the mercies of God in this world and in the
next.
Glorious things are spoken of you, O Mary, for from you arose the sun of justice, Christ our God. We need no other song. This is the new song, God’s redeemed composition, its instruments chosen, its harmonies grounded in love and mercy, its verses unfolding in the lives of those who echoes Mary’s fiat; its climax the singing of the same mercies in a grand choral and orchestral tutti, the perpetuum mobile of the eternal chorus.
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