Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord

Lectionary: 545

It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats take away sins. For this reason, when Christ came into the world, he said:

“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,    but a body you prepared for me; in holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight. Then I said, ‘As is written of me in the scroll, behold, I come to do your will, O God.’”

 

An ancient Christian heresy, monophysitism, taught that Jesus was human and is now God, with the suggestion that his humanity was no longer necessary or important. If the Lord had been, at one time, enmeshed in our messy, unpleasant world he was now – Thank God! – free of all that. Unconstrained by human limits, Jesus could now be slave or free, Jew or gentile, male or female. He could be all things to all people and anything you like.

Divisions, boundaries, and barriers of humanity remain in place because they have nothing to do with him, or he with them. Likewise his gospel transcends space and time by Word and Spirit without the corporeality of human involvement or investment. Someone, happening across a Bible, might read it and be saved without ever meeting another Christian. Who knows, but beamed into outer space, the Scriptures might evangelize distant civilizations of far away galaxies and peoples of a potential polyverse. 

In monophysitism, there is no need for sacraments, the witness of the saints, the personal integrity of Christians, apostolic succession, or papal infallibility. If you like, you can commune with God (who is neither he nor she) on your patio, over your breakfast of coffee and a cigarette, in pristine solitude. The word of God is pure -- and purely -- without human impurity.

[Interestingly, in 451, when Pope Leo's delegates at the Council of Chalcedon persuaded the gathered bishops to renounce the heresy, they also recognized the supremacy of Rome among the dioceses of the Church. That decision would mature into the doctrine of papal infallibility fourteen centuries later, which is also a logical extension of today's solemn feast.] 

However, a good heresy doesn't just go away. It has too much to offer to gullible or self-willed people. It appears among us today as religions without tradition; spiritualities without religion; ethics without spirituality; and, frankly, atheism. 

The Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, like every other Catholic feastday, reminds us that the Lord God of Heaven and Earth lives among us in the person of Jesus Christ. Risen from the dead, he is more human, not less, than we knew him before his crucifixion. The gospels show in considerable detail his rising as a man: he appeared to his disciples and they recognized him by his wounds; he ate with them; they touched him, and he walked with them on the road to Emmaus. If they thought they were seeing a ghost, he disabused them of that thought immediately. His resurrection was more than a spiritual event. 

He remains with us physically in the Church, which is his body, and especially in the Eucharist. His being with us is historical; there is a continuity of events, persons, and geographical places from the Cenacle in Jerusalem to your parish church . His presence is spiritual in the sense that he has inspired the Church from that Easter evening when he breathed on his disciples until this moment as you are led to study the scriptures -- and into the distant future. 

The Solemnity of the Annunciation recalls the beginning of his physical presence among us as he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. Even before he was born, John the Baptist was dancing for joy in utero at his coming. But his history, like yours and mine, began long before he was born. We celebrate that too as we embrace our Jewish heritage and honor our Jewish associates. 

Jesus, born of Mary, anchors us in this world as his grace penetrates, heals, and glorifies every stratum of our being. Our bodies must be healed; our emotions, welcomed; our knowledge, edified; our finances, sanctified, our relationships, reconciled; our memories, clarified, our sexuality, purified, and our recreations, re-creative. Even the infrastructures of our world will be attuned to the Kingdom of God by the edifying (up-building) spirit. 

The Spirit of God seeks no shortcuts to salvation -- none like monophysitism would describe -- as we learn to live in the freedom of God's people.