The feast of the Annunciation, celebrating Mary’s pivotal “Yes!” to God, the instant the Eternal Word took our flesh, the Incarnation, was transferred this year to Monday April 4 because of the Sacred Triduum. In the traditional form of the Roman Rite, every time we say the Creed we genuflect at the mention of the Incarnation (only twice a year in the Novus Ordo). This is the very “fullness of time”, foretold in prophecy. We meditate on this moment in the first joyful mystery of the rosary. This helps us to understand ourselves better as members of the Church.
Speaking of the Church, St Ambrose of Milan (d 397), commenting on Luke 1:26-38, makes a connection between Mary and Holy Mother Church. “Therefore, the Evangelist, who had undertaken to prove the incorrupt mystery of the Incarnation, thought it fruitless to pursue evidence of Mary’s virginity, lest he be seen as a defender of the Virgin rather than an advocate of the mystery.
“Surely, when he taught that Joseph was righteous, he adequately declared that he could not violate the temple of the Holy Spirit, the mother of the Lord, the womb of the mystery. We have learned the lineage of the Truth. We have learned its counsel. Let us learn its mystery. Fittingly is she espoused, but virgin, because she prefigures the Church which is undefiled (cf Eph 5:27) yet wed.
“A Virgin conceived us of the Spirit, a Virgin brings us forth without travail. And thus perhaps Mary, wed to one, was filled by Another, because also the separate Churches are indeed filled by the Spirit and by grace and yet are joined to the appearance of a temporal Priest” (Exposition of the Gospel of Luke 2:6-7).
Ambrose’s Marian thought has an ecclesiological dimension. The Second Vatican Council cited this important passage in Lumen Gentium 63. Because of Mary’s Fiat mihi, we can be members of the Church. Mary is also our Mother. Our baptism integrates us into this wondrous bond.
St Leo the Great (d 461) preached in a sermon for Christmas of 443: “Each one is a partaker of this spiritual origin in regeneration. To everyone, when he is reborn, the water of baptism is like the Virgin’s womb, for the same Holy Spirit fills the font who filled the Virgin, that the sin, which that sacred conception overthrew, may be taken away by this mystical washing” (s 24.3).
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