Monday April 4, 2005 Homily by Fr. Robert Altier Feast of the Annunciation (Observed)
Reading I (Isaiah 7:10-14) Reading II (Hebrews 10:4-10)
Gospel (St. Luke 1:26-38)
As we celebrate today the Feast of the Annunciation, it is really the
celebration of the Incarnation of Christ. So many people mistakenly think that
the Incarnation took place on Christmas. It did not; it took place on the 25th
of March. Now we are celebrating it today because the 25th of March
fell during Holy Week, and so the Church transferred the feast to today.
However, the Feast of the Annunciation is the day that Our Lord became flesh in
the womb of His mother. As we heard the angel coming to our Blessed Lady and
asking her if she would be willing to be the Mother of God, thanks be to God
for Our Lady’s fiat: Let it be done to me according to thy word. It was in this that Our Lord became man.
He Who is God from all eternity, He Who is a
Divine Person, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, humbled Himself and
condescended to become one of us, to take our human nature to Himself. Not to
become a human person, because He did not; He became a human being but not a
human person. He is a Divine Person and He can only be one person. Therefore,
since He is a Divine Person from all eternity, that did not change. What He did
was to take a human nature to Himself. That means He took a human body that had
human blood and a human soul. He did not take a human personality; He had His
Divine personality. And so His Divinity was then united by a humanity, and the
two in a substantial manner – the humanity and the Divinity of Christ – make up
the perfect union of one Person. He is not two persons; He is one Person.
But in the Incarnation, He then has a Divine mind and He has a human
mind. He has a Divine will and He has a human will. Two minds and two wills,
but only one Person. So He can operate as God and He can operate as man. And in
the perfection of the union of one Person, these two natures did not interfere
with one another at all. They remained completely separate and unimpaired; they
did not in any way interfere with one another’s working. But He was able, as
only God could, to operate on two different levels in the perfect unity of one
single Person. That is what we celebrate today: the feast of God becoming man,
the feast of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ at the Annunciation.
And thanks be to God for our Blessed Lady,
who, even though it did not make sense to her how she could conceive as a
virgin, was willing to say “yes” so that the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the
Father and the Son, would have an opportunity to become life-giving in our
Blessed Lady, so that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, from Whom the Holy
Spirit proceeds, would now be conceived in the womb of Our Lady through the
power of the Holy Spirit.
This is an
astounding thing, and it is something which we will meditate upon for the rest
of eternity, assuming that we go the right direction. There will be no end to
the meditation on the Incarnation because it is an absolute mystery, one which
we will never be able to understand even in heaven. We can grasp parts of it,
but because it deals with the Divine nature itself, we will never come to the
end of it. The wonderful part, if you just want to ponder this one for awhile,
is that even in His humanity Jesus does not understand the Incarnation
perfectly. In His Divinity, He does; in His humanity, He does not. And so for
all eternity, because it is an infinite mystery and His human nature is finite,
He too will ponder this mystery of the Incarnation in His human nature, in His
human mind, and will never understand it completely. In His Divinity, of
course, He understands it fully and perfectly. So, for all eternity, we will be
able to look at Jesus and we will never come to the end. There will always be
more.
We can start now to place ourselves in front of the
Blessed Sacrament, to look at Him Who is both God and man, and to meditate upon
this mystery of our salvation, that mystery which began in the most full way at
the moment of the Annunciation, when, thanks be to God, the grace was given to
Our Lady to accept the humility of God and to say “yes” so that He would be
conceived in her womb and we would be saved.
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.