By: Michel Côté, OP
The text of the Visitation this morning is a very well-know story: It touches into the fundament paradigm and myth-basis of our Christian tradition.
The evocative power of this scene has been expressed by many painters throughout history. Just look up “Annunciation” in Wikipedia – as I did — to see the dozens and dozens of attempts at presenting this theme.
The painters have this scene placed in many different contexts : temple, home, monastery, garden, balcony, you name it!
Mary is involved in a multitude of positions or occupations : reading scriptures, praying, meditating, spinning wool. We just know for sure that she is not saying her Rosary…
I thought that Fra Angelico’s original painting would be, you know, just an ordinary-sized painting, maybe one foot X 2 feet. But when I went to Florence and entered the San Marco convent and was walking up to the second floor, there stood before me his fresco of the Annuntiation on top of the stairs that was at least eight feet tall and ten feet wide. It was huge!
I mean, how does one paint God-encounters?
This story, concerns an ordinary woman about to experience an extraordinary moment in her life. It shows how the person Mary is visited by the divine.
Again, the artists show various angles of light coming upon her; or a miniature baby rushing over to her side on a wave of light. Or even a bird with the baby. Now, does the bird (dove) symbolize the divine spirit hovering over the waters of creation in Genesis or the image of God as mother hen hovering over her brood, an image of divine protection? Who knows!
So yes, the question remains, how does one describe the awesome reality that is going on here?
In his movie “Jesus of Nazareth”, Franco Zeferelli, the writer and movie producer, simply keeps the camera on Mary’s face with special music effects supporting the whole scene.
Something surprising is happening but Zeferelli does not want past or recent symbols in Mariology to hone in and circumscribe too quickly the greatness and majesty of the event. He leaves us guessing, allowing us to bask wondrously in God’s mysterious intervention.
Even to describe this scene, Luke uses a story line that has its roots in the divine encounter narrative presenting the pregnancy of Sampson’s mother (Jg 13:2-7), which is then reflected in Luke’s “annunciation” to Zachariah (John the Baptist’s father), and then in the appearance of the angels to the shepherds at Jesus’ birth. Surprizingly, Matthew’s rendition of the annunciation is given to Joseph rather than to Mary.
In all these special divine intervention passages,
•There is always a greeting by a heavenly messenger [angel]: a very short “Hi!” [Kaire]
•The angel then says something in Greek about Mary that can be loosely translated: “How lucky you are! (full of grace)– you have been chosen by God” (Beloved — God is with you)
•The surprising offsetting presence of the messenger is then followed by a comforting and reassuring statement : “Do not be afraid” (of course, Mary and all the others visited by an angel are completely terrorized ; how would we, you & I feel, if we were visited !)
•Then the angel states the wonderful things that are about to happen: “You will bear the child of God” a child, who will be the answer to God’s promises”.
Here Mary takes time to ask a very normal question: “Sounds Great! But HOW is this really supposed to happen?]
•It gives the angel the chance to complete his message. [“The power of God will come upon you.”]
•And the angel finishes by promising a sign: the birth of a boy to her supposedly barren cousin Elizabeth, who, it seems, is already in her sixth month of pregnancy.
And you’ll notice that Mary does not spend time to gloat on her fate, to re-enact or mull over the scene. Rather she rushes off immediately to check out if what she has just experienced is real, if the sign is true – for Elisabeth, and therefore for her!]
In the bible, we have multiple stories of God visiting humans. Did this particular visit to Mary last just a minute? An hour? A day? Did it really happen this way? Is this text a virtual copy of the real thing? A Polaroid picture? Or an analogy? A “something-like” what really happened?
Well, we’ll never know, except once we’re in heaven! And in a way that’s really not the important lesson here. Scholars trying to take this story apart to prove it’s veracity or falsehood are completely missing the boat.
It would be like trying to define electricity: we know it’s there, we know its manifestations, we use it constantly, but it’s make-up is still a total mystery to electricians and scientists.
Or as my nephew (who is a expert in brain-scans) likes to say: “Uncle Michel, I’ve been working on brain-scans for years and we still don’t know how the brain works. All we know is where the blood gushes to for certain functions, and heats up the brain. But the brain, the synapses, consciousness itself, baffles us completely… It is a mystery!
And this intervention – the coming of “God-in-the-World-to be-with-us” — remains an even greater mystery!
The important part here is that God takes the initiative and reaches out to humans. Now if we go back six hundred years ago to see how people saw God or understood the idea of a Creator God of the universe : this was certainly a big item in people’s minds, because for them the sun circled around the earth and there were a lot of lightbulbs up in the sky at night. A huge God for sure!
But today we know that God the Creator is the source and origin not only of the 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way, but also of the two trillion constellations/ galaxies like the Milky Way (and that’s only the part we can see).
And it is this Creator of enormously all that, who shows himself surprisingly concerned about itsy-bitsy teeny weeny little us on this planet… Now, that’s a mystery, for sure !!!
This intervention with Mary shows us again (as the Hebrew testament shows us) that this God wants to be personal, to love us, wants to be close to us, to give us meaning and direction through the power of our brother and Lord, Jesus, and his Holy Spirit.
God is banking on some special humans to allow humanity to come to its full potential. In this, Mary’s life – and ours – is about to be changed forever.
She opens herself up to possibilities, to the unknown, to God’s mystery.
She adheres to that simple portion of history that she can grasp at that time and in that space.
There would be many more moments in her life when she would have to say “Yes”, each time deepening the commitment of this, her first “Yes”.
Mary was a special woman: the first full believer, the God-carrier, the privileged parent of Jesus, the one who accompanied him from birth to death, she was also a special witness to the birth of the Church (Acts 1:14).
But nothing she does places her outside the ordinariness of life. She acts as any young Israelite woman would have. She follows the traditions of her people. She lives in a small village and probably did all the chores and had all the responsibilities that other women had.
And yet, Mary was an extraordinary / ordinary person. Her only claim to fame is that she triggered, through her deep belief, the process of the incarnation…and, that is some process !
How would you and I, we, have reacted if we had received this kind of divine call? How do we even react today listening to this story?
For the same God is knocking at our door anew through the words of the reading we just heard.
Let us acquaint ourselves again with this great event. Let us meditate on the paradoxical awesome-ness and proximity of our God. We are today invited to imitate Mary in her sense of trust and belief.
Let us now individually and together enter into the full mystery that this story and this Eucharist seek to evoke: that of a maiden who through her simple consent prepared the world for the coming of the Lord among us, a celebration that we will highlight in a few days… with the arrival of Christmas Day!
Yes, the annuntiation really is chock full of mystery !!!