[Sermon composed for the Sunday broadcast at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix AZ (https://www.stmarysphoenix.org/online) for Sunday, December, 2020, the Fourth Sunday of Advent (Western) or the Seventh Sunday of Advent (Ancient)]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
One of the fun things about this season is that we get to revisit stuff we celebrate throughout the year. Case in point, we do not just get to hear about the Annunciation on March 25th; we hear about it every time we say the Angelus, every time we say the Rosary, every time we rattle off a Hail Mary for whatever reason.
Today, the Gospel selected for the Mass is …wait for it…the Annunciation. In other years when singing in Church was not a bad idea, countless choirs would rattle off “The Angel Gabriel”[1] as part of their Advent repertoire. Now, one of the great (or aggravating, if you are a choral director trying to whittle down the options) things is that a popular season or story has a lot of hymnody associated with it. The problem is, we get so familiar with it we become deaf to the message. Really, aside from “The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came,” and “Most Highly Favoured Lady” can you remember it all without some degree of effort?
I will give you a hand here:
1. Gabriel tells Our Lady she is most favoured of God despite her social standing,
2. Gabriel tells her that she is going to be a mother,
3. He tells her that she is going to be famous for it,
4. Not to let that rest, he says that she will be the one to bear “the” Emmanuel prophesied by Isaiah,
5. She then without missing a beat or blinking (but still showing humility) says, “Sure, sign me up.”
6. The song finishes by saying Christ (that is, Jesus) is this child born later in Bethlehem.
Here we have a relatively simple premise, relatively short in duration, catchy tune, pretty standard theology with no apparent heavy lifting.
Orthodox hymn composers, however, while they can do short (if they must) and have been known to use a catchy tune now and then, tend to fall short on simple premises and no heavy lifting. For example, St. Romanos the Melodist composed a kontakion[2] that in its poetry took this theme and this message and ran with it. Here we see the Melodist had taken license to perhaps give voice to Gabriel’s inner thoughts and flesh out the implications of the Annunciation. Here I quote:
A prince of the angels was sent from heaven to say to the Theotokos, “Hail!” And seeing Thee, O Lord, take bodily form at the sound of his bodiless voice, he was filled with amazement and stood still, crying to her thus:
“Hail, thou through whom joy will shine forth:
Hail, thou through whom the curse will cease.
Hail, thou restoration of fallen Adam:
Hail, thou redemption of the tears of Eve.
Hail, thou Height hard to climb for the thought of man:
Hail, thou Depth hard to perceive even for the eyes of angels.
Hail, thou that art the throne of the King:
Hail, thou who dost hold Him who holdeth all.
Hail, thou Star who dost make the Sun appear:
Hail, thou Womb of the divine incarnation.
Hail, thou through whom the creation is made new:
Hail, thou through whom the Creator becomes a newborn child.
Hail, thou Bride unwedded!”
By way of comparison here is what St. Luke recorded in today’s Gospel:
“He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High,
and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.
He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.
the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.”[3]
The core of all Mariological doctrine is the central fact that she carried, delivered, raised, and served the Redeemer of Creation. For example, in the poetry of the Melodist, which may seem overblown to Anglicans and downright incomprehensible to Protestants, the central fact that Mary, by her willingness to be more than just an accessory to the Divine plan, did become all this.
“Through whom all joy will shine forth,” means that because she agreed to bear Jesus Our Lord; by her willingness, the joy of our redemption, Our Lord, came into the world.
“Through whom the curse shall cease,” means that the One she bore would by His Death and Resurrection destroy the curse of Death, reconciling us to God, and in good time restoring us to His eternal Life.
“Restoration of fallen Adam,” means that all humanity, here called Adam, and even Adam himself, would be reconciled to God through Our Lady’s agreement to bear God the Word Incarnate whose plan was to restore fallen humanity.
“Redemption of the tears of Eve,” means our sorrows resulting from all the corruption and death around us will be healed, for the Blessed Virgin’s Son will have destroyed their cause.
“Height hard to climb for the thought of man;” really, it has not been easy for people to comprehend for the past two thousand years how or even why God accomplished this with Mary outside the normative process.
“Depth hard to perceive even for the eyes of angels;” keep in mind if you think YOU are having issues with comprehending the thought of a woman being so full of God’s grace that she has become the fitting vessel to bringing forth the Saviour of the World without the agency of a mortal human male, the angels had just as hard a time with it.
“The throne of the King,” is just that: for nine months the King of Kings sat within her and as a child sat upon her and as the crucified rested briefly upon her.
“Who dost hold Him who holdeth all,” is another very deep consideration: The Blessed Mother held close to her and cared for the One who holds everyone and everything in His care and protection, including her.
“Star who dost make the Sun appear,” this woman who was humble and so in tune with God that she shone so brightly with His grace that she was the one chosen to bear the Sun of Righteousness, the Life-Giver, our Light and Warmth.
“Womb of the Divine Incarnation,” is pretty much self-explanatory at the point, is it not?
“Through whom the creation is made new,” tells us that she bore the One whose Sacrifice redeems not just us but all the cosmos, and as we are remade and reborn, creation is restored and corruption, Death, entropy will be no more.
“Through whom the Creator becomes a newborn child,” is the central mystery of the Incarnation. God did not assume flesh by an act of will pulling matter inward to create a body out of whole-cloth but assumed flesh by a biological process housed within a biological host created in His image and full of grace who was a fully willing participant in the plan.
“Thou Bride Unwedded;” a truly great mystery indeed, that while God Incarnate is fully human, He did so by choosing an unwed young woman, a bride but not yet married, now a mother yet still a virgin, wise yet innocent, both active and passive, a simple girl who agreed to partner with the Triune God to accomplish the most daring thing that ever was or ever shall be in the history of the cosmos.
The King who is to come, the ruler of united Israel past, present, and yet to come, the King of the nations grafted into the House of Jacob, the everlasting immortal Son of God came into the world because a young woman in Judaea, having trained for this all her life without knowing it, when it came time to decide on the fate of the world, said yes to God’s plan. It is right that we honour her as the chief of the saints, the Mother of God, whose mission was to bring God to us and point us to Him, whose Advent we await.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Saviour save us.
The Annunciation, By anonymous - Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai (Egypt) / K. Weitzmann: "Die Ikone", Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3859787
[1] You can hear this particular carol, from the Basque region in the Franco-Spanish borderlands, as sung by King’s College Cambridge here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCploJcOXsg [2] This type of kontakion is called an Akathist as it is delivered standing. This one is the Akathist to the Theotokos and has in its fulness about 25 kontakia and ikoi (poetic forms). Here is quoted the first ikos as translated by the monks of Annunciation of the Theotokos Monastery in Reddick FL. [3] St. Lk. 1.32-33