It is both fitting and wonderful that Monday of the last week of Advent features once again the Annunciation. In a real sense, it is back to the beginning of this holy season. Our first reading is from the beginning of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, from that part of that book known as “Proto” or “First”-Isaiah. Judging by its use in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, this passage has been understood by Christians practically from the beginning as a prophecy about Jesus Christ.1
In context, however, this passage was an attempt to dissuade King Ahaz, who ruled the southern kingdom, which included Jerusalem, from joining with the northern kingdom and Syria to rebel against the Assyrians. What is going on is that the prophet instructs the king to ask for a sign that what the prophet is saying is what the king should do. But the king refuses, saying one should not tempt God. “Therefore,” says the prophet, “the Lord himself will give you a sign; the young woman, pregnant and about to bear a son, shall name him Emmanuel.”2
It is not clear who the woman or the child are. In the context of the prophecy it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the span of time: by the time the child is conceived, born, and learns the difference between good and evil, the two kingdoms Ahaz is considering joining in rebellion will be defeated.
It is also important to note that the word in the Hebrew original often translated as “virgin,” almah, simply means “young woman.” “Virgin” comes into play because the author of Matthew, taking his text from the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, uses the Greek word parthenos, which does mean “virgin.”
It is easy to see why this verse is seen as a prophecy of Christ. Jesus is, in word and in deed, Emmanuel, God with us. This one word can be used to sum up Christianity, at least in its essence, in its existential reality. Sometimes God's word is just that: one word.
The Annunciation, by Andrea Solario, 1506
In our Gospel, Mary is puzzled at the greeting given her by the archangel Gabriel. She is puzzled because it is such an exalted greeting. Why would anyone, let alone a glorious heavenly being, greet a marginal person, a poor young woman in backwards village, in such a way? The answer to this question lies at the end of the passage, when, after hearing what God has in store for her, Mary says: “May it be done to me according to your word.”3 This affirmation and acceptance of God’s will, we call Mary’s fiat.
Fiat is something like the Latin equivalent of the Hebrew “Amen.” But it means more than merely “so be it,” it means to willfully create something. In this moment Mary’s will was God’s will and vice-versa. As we heard about Christ in our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews yesterday, “I come to do your will, O God.”4
Doing God’s will is the way Christ is born in and through you. As Mary, who is the model disciple, shows us: doing God’s will isn’t always easy. It is often the case that successfully doing God’s will looks like failure. How can doing God’s will result in a young woman turning up pregnant with a child not conceived with her betrothed? How can God’s will result in the cross, or in the many different experiences of Christian martyrs throughout two millennia?
We know that it is God’s will that we gather around this altar and listen to his word. Through the Eucharist we are strengthened to live according to what we’ve heard. At the end of Mass, we are sent to do it.
As we prepare for a New Year, just as we constantly hear talk about evangelization, most of it quite fuzzy, we also hear rumblings about a “Eucharistic revival.” But just as evangelization consists of telling others what Jesus has done for you, what difference knowing Jesus makes in your life and how you live it, what a Eucharistic revival needs, to borrow the words of Michael Sean Winters, is “those who claim to follow the Lord to follow him, to empty themselves as he emptied himself, to take up their cross as he did, to cling obediently to the Father's will."5
1 Matthew 1:23.↩
2 Isaiah 7:14.↩
3 Luke 1:38.↩
4 Hebrews 10:7.↩
5 Michael Sean Winters. “US bishops lost about how to engage a culture they don't understand,” in National Catholic Reporter online. 19 November 2021↩
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