A Homily for Lady Day
Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name
Immanuel.--Isaiah 7:14
Tuesday is the feast of the Annunciation to the Blessed
Virgin Mary, called, in the tradition of the English-speaking peoples, “Lady
Day.” It is truly a feast day of our Lady; but it is also the feast
of the Incarnation. As such it is one of the most important festivals
of the Church year; but, as it always occurs during Lent, the festivity is
generally reserved for Christmastide.
The doctrine of the Incarnation is the distinctive doctrine
of Christianity. Belief in the Incarnation sets us Christians apart
from the adherents of every other religion, or of no religion. Other
religions teach that there is one God, the creator of heaven and earth; other
religions teach that God expects us to live morally, circumspectly, and humbly,
to visit the sick, to provide for the poor, and to bury the dead. Other
religions teach that it is our duty to God to worship him and to keep his
commandments.
But we Christians, alone, know and believe that “in the
beginning the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . and the Word
became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”
And the feast of the Annunciation annually commemorates
the day and the moment when that occurred. It happened in the sixth
month of the Hebrew calendar—the first month begins each year on or about
the autumnal equinox, in late September of our calendar, so the sixth month
was the month of the vernal equinox, our March. The archangel Gabriel
was sent by God to the town of Nazareth in Galilee, to a virgin named Miriam—that
is, named after the sister of Moses—or as we say, “Mary.”
And the archangel Gabriel greeted her: “Hail, full
of grace, the Lord is with thee! Blessed art thou amongst women!”
And the girl, Mary, was troubled, and wondered just what such a greeting
might mean.
Gabriel told Mary: “The Holy Ghost will come upon
you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” “And you
will conceive in your womb, and bring forth a son, and name him Jesus. .
. . and his kingdom will have no end.” And he “will be called
the Son of God.”
And Mary said: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord;
be it unto me according to thy word.”
That sentence was the turning point of all of world history,
for at that moment, God the Son, begotten of the Father before all worlds,
very God of very God, took human flesh and united our humanity to his divinity
forever.
It is important that we understand what happened and what
it means for us.
Our Saviour began his earthly life in the same way we
all did, as a zygote—a single-celled, but fully human, organism within his
mother’s body: a distinct human life from the moment of conception.
Mary was truly his mother; her body produced the egg that
became his human body, and her placenta nourished him through nine months
of gestation. His humanity was just like our humanity; there was no
special act of creation, no separate human-like, but not really human, form.
A heretical bishop in the fifth century famously claimed
that God the Son passed through Mary like water through a pipe; and there
are those to this day who will acknowledge Mary only as a surrogate mother.
And it would not matter what they say, except that, as the Fathers of the
Church unanimously taught, that which is not united to God is not saved.
And that means that unless God in Christ Jesus took upon him our very nature,
our nature remains irretrievably fallen.
This was so important to the writers of the Gospels that
they traced Jesus’s genetic inheritance through a hundred generations:
through David and Bathsheba, a thousand years before Jesus’s birth, and through
Judah and Tamar nearly five hundred years before that. And through
Abraham and Sarah, to whom the promise was made.
The genealogies in the Gospels are there to refute one
of the earliest of heresies, a heresy arising from awe of the majesty of
God. People we now call “docetists” believed that God was too pure,
too holy, to far beyond our material world ever to be corrupted by taking
on human flesh. Therefore, they believed that God the Son only seemed
to possess a human body, only appeared to suffer on the cross, only simulated
dying.
The possibility of misunderstanding was such a threat
to the early Church that in 451 a great council was held in the city of Chalcedon,
in what is now Turkey, to agree on a single statement of the faith of the
Church concerning the incarnation. And this is the definition that
was agreed upon:
Following the holy Fathers we teach with one voice that
the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is to be confessed as one and
the same [Person], that he is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood,
very God and very man, consisting of a reasonable soul and [human] body,
being of one substance with the Father as touching his Godhead, and of one
substance with us as touching his manhood;
made in all things like unto us, sin only excepted; begotten
of his Father before all worlds according to his Godhead; but in these last
days for us men and for our salvation born of the Virgin Mary, the
Mother of God, according to his manhood.
This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only-begotten
Son, must be confessed to be in two natures, unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly,
inseparably [united], and that the distinction of natures is not taken away
by such union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature is preserved
and united in one Person and subsistence, not separated or divided into two
persons,
but one and the same Son and only-begotten, God the Word,
our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Prophets of old time have spoken concerning
him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ hath taught us, and as the Creed of the
Fathers hath delivered to us.
And in the Quicunque Vult, sometimes called the “Athanasian
Creed,” we profess:
It is necessary to eternal salvation that [a person] [.
. .] also believe faithfully the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, is both God and Man. He is God of the substance of
the Father, begotten before the worlds; and he is man of the substance of
his mother, born in the world; perfect God and perfect man, of reasoning
soul and human flesh subsisting; equal to the Father as touching
his Godhead; less than the Father as touching his manhood.
Who, although he be God and man, yet he is not two, but
is one Christ; one, however, not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but
by taking of manhood into God; one altogether, not by confusion of substance,
but by unity of person. For as reasoning soul and flesh is one man,
so God and man is one Christ; who suffered for our salvation, descended into
hell, rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, sat down at the right
hand of the Father, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the
dead.
This is the mystery of our faith. This is the central
belief that makes us Christians and Catholics, and not Jews, or Moslems;
or Mormons, or Christian Scientists, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is
how we know we are saved: because for us men and for our salvation,
the only begotten Son of God came down from heaven, and was incarnate by
the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and became man.
And now to Jesus Christ our Lord, who loves us, and washed
us in his own blood, and made us a kingdom of priests to serve his God and
Father, to him be all glory and dominion, henceforth, world without end.
Church of Saint Mary Magdalene
Orange, California
March 25, 2003
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