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Today is the Annunciation of the Lord, or we sometimes say the Annunciation of Mary. The angel announces the Good News to the Virgin, ‘you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.’
In the Breviary today, we read a beautiful letter by Leo the Great where he says; ‘to pay the debt of our sinful state, he says, a nature incapable of suffering was joined to a nature that could suffer.’
The Son of God stooped down from his heavenly life, and ‘took on our lowly human nature, to save it. Christ took the nature of a servant, without sin, enlarging our humanity without diminishing his Divinity.’ This is what happens in the dear Blessed Virgin, 9 months before Christmas.
The Incarnation, the fact that God himself, the creator of all things, would enter his own creation, and unite himself to – to the material world – well, this is the scandal, the shock of Christianity that the world cannot tolerate.
In then Cardinal Ratzinger’s famous book: Introduction to Christianity,[i] he speaks interestingly about this. He says that most people will admit that there is some form of ‘supreme being,’ or God, but it is absurd that this being should concern himself with us, or come down to us. They say that we are naïve to think this; that these ideas are left over from a primitive, ancient world of ignorant people. Our tiny and unimportant planet, this speck of dust in the universe, shows that we are nothing; it is absurd that a supreme being would concern himself with us, with our sins, or our problems.
The future Pope says, on the contrary; God reaches down to the smallest, because to him, nothing is too small. this is true greatness: that the great would stoop down to the little.
Why would a chief executive of Exxon, such an important person, have any interest in helping a poor, dirty, street person in the gutter? Well, if he does, we would call this great. Is not God greater because he compassions his creatures? The world errors in thinking of a Creator in a worldly, narrow way; they project the idea onto God, that the powerful are not loving. Is God not greater, if he wishes to stoop down to this speck of dust, and take concern over each of our problems, unite himself to us, walk and suffer our own life with us? He did it, because he is infinitely good.
‘And Mary said, ‘May it be done unto me, according to thy word,’ and the Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory.
