The Annunciation, Grief, and Participation

A couple times in my ministry, I’ve had the chance to preach on the Annunciation, which the Church celebrates today, the event of Gabriel’s announcing to Mary the great privilege and burden she will bear on behalf of salvation history. The following is a pastiche of some of the Annunciation homilies I’ve preached.

Today we stand somewhere between Christmas and Easter—between Christ’s Incarnation and his resurrection.

To stand in this place is perhaps jarring or confusing. Maybe it evokes a sense of compassion for Mary, for the burden of an unexpected calling, and then the trauma of losing him in such a violent way.

Mary’s story offers to us an angle for coming to understand Jesus’s passion. When we hold together the wonder and dynamism of Mary’s story with the staggering agony of Jesus’s trial, torture, and death, we come away with a powerful sense of the personal scope of the drama of our salvation. It is not only cosmic or doctrinal—it is lived, suffered, and borne.

And yet, Mary’s story is often overlooked.

Those of us outside of Roman Catholicism are sometimes wary of the “cult of Mary,” devotion to her, prayer or intercession through her, calling her the Mother of God (Theotokos in Greek veneration) or holding to her (perpetual) virginity. Detractors of Mary worry about superstitious beliefs. Even some of our Anglican forebears thought Marian devotion to be “a vain thing” devised by “the Papists.”

But I see in Mary something that’s not vain, but tender, something that’s not superstitious, but obvious to anyone who has ever watched a woman rear a child.

I see in Mary the symbol of us all.

Through baptism, we carry Christ in our hearts, but she carried him in her womb. In worship and prayer, we love Christ as our own, but he was her baby boy. We all want to better feel the compunction, the moral pull of Christ’s wounds, and so we walk these stations of the Cross, but Mary felt the wounds and death of her child as a sword through her own heart, as Simeon prophesied that she would in Luke 2 when Mary brought Jesus to the temple on the 8th day.

This isn’t to say there is anything less authentic about our faith because we aren’t Christ’s mother. Rather, it’s to point to the grounding of our faith, our love, our compassion in the experience of a real human being, a woman from Palestine who carried Jesus for 10 months, who raised him in all the ways mothers have raised their children for millennia, who followed his career as parents everywhere take an interest in their children’s adult life.

In his poem, ‘the Annunciation,” John Donne, the great Anglican priest and poet of the 17th century, dwells on this mystery.

Ere by the spheres time was created thou

Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother;

Whom thou conceivest, conceived; yea, thou art now

Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother,

Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room

Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.

What Mary tries to show us is that salvation is not something that happens at a distance from us. It is something we are drawn into. Not as spectators, but as participants.

To carry Christ—whether in the hidden life of prayer, in acts of love, or in the quiet endurance of suffering—is to find our lives taken up into his. Gabriel’s mystery announced is not Mary’s alone. It is, in its own way, the essence of the Christian life lived: to receive what is given, to bear it faithfully, and to discover, often only in retrospect, that even our grief has been gathered into something larger than we could have imagined.

Hail Mary, full of grace…