At the earliest Easter can fall on 22 March. The latest Easter can occur is 25 April. We generally celebrate the great Paschal feast somewhere between these two poles. So, along with the Solemnity of Saint Joseph on 19 March, which always occurs during Lent, the Solemnity of the Annunciation is almost always observed during this penitential season.
The best years are when one of these two solemnities happen on a Lenten Friday. When this occurs, the obligation to abstain from meat on Fridays of Lent is abrogated. To the extent possible, solemnities are to be observed as Sundays.
Often confused with the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord is proof that liturgical arithmetic works. Today is nine months before Christmas.
Even during Lent, Sundays remain celebrations of the Lord’s resurrection, just as throughout the year, unless there is a solemnity, each Friday is a penitential day on account of Christ’s crucifixion. And so, this evening and tomorrow morning the Church will sing the Gloria, which we don't say or sing during Lent, and recite the Creed.
In her celebration of Morning Prayer for each of the first four Sundays of Lent, the Church reminds those praying of the sacred and celebratory nature of Sunday. This is done by means of the scriptural reading, taken from the Book of Nehemiah: “Today is holy to the Lord your God. Do not be sad, and do not weep for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength!”1
Speaking of the Creed, whether we recite Nicene Creed or the Apostles Creed, as we confess the incarnation of God’s Son in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we bow. In his Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul wrote:
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”2
The incarnation is an earth-shattering, cosmic-altering, event. As our reading from Hebrews clearly points out, it is necessary for God’s Son to become human so that he could really die and be bodily raised from the dead. For His sacrifice to be an acceptable one, He also had to be truly divine. Being human, unlike an animal that is sacrificed, the Son had to freely offer Himself.
It was necessary for Jesus to say to the Father, “I come to do your will.” As the inspired author of Hebrews insists, “By this ‘will,’ we have been consecrated through the offering of the Body of Jesus Christ once for all.”3
Just as Jesus’ sacrifice was made efficacious by His freely abandoning Himself to the will of the Father, so Mary’s fiat, her “May it be done to me according to your word,”4 was also necessary. Her fiat was risky, potentially lethal and at a minimum perceived as shameful- a young, unmarried woman, turning up pregnant with a child who was not conceived with her betrothed. Mary, too, freely offered herself to God.
As the first Joyful mystery of the Holy Rosary, the fruit of the Annunciation is humility. Our blessed mother couldn’t quite figure out why God had chosen her. We, too, are chosen by God. One of the worst lies of the present age is that we somehow choose or decline God, take or leave Him. This despite Jesus’ insistence that He has chosen us. Faith is a supernatural virtue, a gift from God. Because faith is a gift from God, it is dynamic and remains mysterious.
Like any gift, you can receive, reject, or neglect faith. But for a person who has truly been given the gift of faith, while there are always alternatives, they tend to pale in comparison. The fourth Joyful mystery of the Holy Rosary is Mary and Joseph presenting Jesus in the Temple to fulfill the Law. In the Temple, the Holy Family encounters Simeon. Recognizing Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah, the old man tells Mary, “you yourself a sword will pierce.”5 Suffering produces hope or despair.
The fruit of this mystery is obedience. One way to think of obedience to God is as hope through suffering. Obedience to God is an act of faith. Being the flower of faith, hope blossoms through life’s trials. And so, to and through our Blessed Mother, we pray:
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears
1 Nehemiah 8:9-10.↩
2 Galatians 4:4-6.↩
3 Heberws 10:9-10.↩
4 Luke 1:38.↩
5 Luke 2:35.↩
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