From Father Jerry
Happy New Year!
Just in case you think I’ve gone mad let me point out that until 1752 March 25th was New Year’s Day! It is the feast of the Annunciation, and when the calendar years were first numbered from the birth of Christ it was thought that there was no better day to begin each year than the day when the incarnation of the Son of God was announced to the world.
For it is the day when we remember the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary to announce to her that she would give birth to a child who would be the Son of God.
The Annunciation often falls during Lent. However – just to confuse us all, March 25th this year is also Palm Sunday, and the Church says we can’t keep two feast days on the same day and says that we must therefore keep the Annunciation on the 9th April which is the next available free day. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. So I shall do what the Orthodox Church does without any problem and keep two feast days on one day!
After the main feasts of Christmas, Holy Week and Easter, and Pentecost, the feast of the Annunciation is probably the most important of all the other feasts. It’s a feast that reminds us that God chose to become a part of his creation, that he chose to enter our world and become one of us. It’s also a feast that reminds us that in order to do so he chose to work with a human being, an ordinary Jewish teenager called Mary. And he relied on her saying ‘yes’. Mary may well not have thought that what God wanted was good news, but she accepted his will for her without question, with a resounding, ‘yes, let it be done to me as you have said!’
In a way, Mary’s ‘yes’ in response to God’s message to her is an reflection of the ‘yes’ that we are all called to say as God reaches out to us to say, “I want you and I to work together to bring Jesus to the world.” And that is why, for me at least, it is such an important feast – it tells us that our faith is not about God up in his heaven and us down here doing his will as servants might carry out their master’s wishes. It’s about God and us working hand in hand because that’s what God wants. For he wants willing partners who, like Mary, say ‘yes’ to him and then share with him the task of bringing Jesus to our world. And it really is quite amazing that he would want to use us in this way.
A couple of years ago I attended a retreat for Church Army community members at the Wilson Carlile Centre in Sheffield. Among the Scriptures we looked at together was Micah 6.8: He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Our retreat conductor then spoke about humility, and the way God encourages us to be humble people. The Annunciation is the point at which God’s humility is shown to us, and at which the humility of Mary’s response is shown to us. For me it is a feast that reminds us of the need to humble ourselves before God and to accept his will for us, whatever that may be, just as Mary did.
Each Lent we are faced with the same question: What is God’s will for me? And the Annunciation, falling right at the beginning of Holy Week, also presents us with a question: Having spent Lent discerning God’s will for me can I accept it in all humility as Mary did? For it is with us that he has chosen to work.
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
May we use this time of Lent to walk humbly with our God and convey his justice and kindness to those around us in our world.