The reception of the Annunciation and the place of faith

The Acceptance of the Announcement and the Place of Faith

Limited to accepting God’s salvific work, Mary’s motherhood cannot occur without faith. Thus, the scene concludes with these words: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” in which we recognize the pinnacle of every religious behavior before God, as Mary expresses, to a greater degree, passive availability combined with active readiness, the deepest emptiness that accompanies the greatest fullness.The entire tradition will reinforce this relationship between motherhood and faith to the point of making motherhood a unique form of faith and the following of faith a unique form of motherhood. To believe is thus seen as embracing and giving Christ, as generating him in human history.The work of grace is accomplished in the abandonment of a life animated and guided by faith. This faith, which the *Dei Verbum* (5) will present as the attitude of one who “freely commits himself entirely to God” (a commitment to God free and totally), must be well understood: it is not primarily a personal thought act, a creation of human intelligence, but the acceptance of divine thought and a thought expressed concretely in the form of a word. To believe is to open oneself to this word and receive all the thought it expresses.Mary is an exemplary model of this reception:– her listening to the Word, – her preservation and meditation on it, akin to the prophets and sages of the Old Testament.All these characteristics allow us to make of her *peregrinatio fidei*, pilgrimage of faith, a model for the path of every believer. Mariology is tasked with elaborating the extraordinary path of this figure given to us in terms of a *histórico-midrástico*, that is, through a history that seeks to narrate the central model of life of faith, trinitarian and ecclesial.

The Encounter of the Word with Mary

To develop a theological understanding of the encounter between the Word and Mary, a simple biblical narrative is not enough; a theological development of the encounter is necessary. As it is an encounter, it can only take place on a personal level. Only personal categories allow us to respect the uniqueness of Mary’s figure and her role alongside Jesus. The Mother, as a model of the “daughter of Zion,” must be understood not according to individualistic models, but rather according to communal and historically salvific models.Commenting on the term “full of grace” in the Encyclical “Redemptoris Mater,” Pope John Paul II captures a synthesis of the revelations and promises of the Old Testament. He concludes that: “In the mystery of Christ, she is already present before the creation of the world as one whom the Father chose as the Mother of his Son in the Incarnation, and together with the Father, the Son chose her, entrusting her to the Holy Spirit.”Here, a personalistic language is used, emphasizing choice or election, and drawing on vocational stories to present Mary in the light of God’s call. This indication is valuable because it allows us to recapture key moments in Mary’s figure in relation to God of hesed (grace) and dabar (word): the vocation, in fact, is preceded by election and followed by a mission, and all three correspond in Mary to a dynamic that presents her in a very special and exceptional way to Christ, as his beloved daughter.Mary’s ElectionElection is a term that, in vocational narratives, goes back to “a divine decision before birth”: this is what Jeremiah and Paul say, but especially what is said of every Christian.> God, in fact, “has chosen us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love” (Ephesians 1:4).This election does not refer to a generic divine will, but to that which the Father manifested by sending his Son. Finally, this election is nothing more than the root of the gospel, its eternal foundation.By synthesizing the best aspects of Mariology, Pope John Paul II will address this topic more broadly and do so in the “Lumen Gentium.”In the eighth section of *Redemptoris Mater*, commenting on the passage regarding the Annunciation, it is observed that Mary is present in the mystery of Christ “even before the creation of the world,” as one chosen by the Father “as mother of His Son in the Incarnation,” and together with the Father, the Son also chose her, entrusting her eternally to the Holy Spirit. Mary is united to Christ in a most special and exceptional way, and she is loved eternally in this beloved Son, in this Son consubstantial with the Father, in whom all “the glory of grace” is concentrated.In paragraph 9 of *Redemptoris Mater*, these indications are summarized, concluding that “the election of Mary is exceptionally unique, and thus her singular place in the mystery of Christ.”However, it is in paragraph 11 where we discover that, as a sign of divine election, Mary was “pre-destined from all eternity to be the Mother of the Savior.”«It is placed at the centre of that enmity, that struggle which accompanies the history of humanity on earth and the history of salvation. This election is more powerful than any experience of evil and sin, than all that ‘enmity’ which marks the history of man.»

In general, it can be said that the election of Mary as Mother is «the particular means» of access to the mystery of this Son, the Saviour of humanity. In this sense, motherhood, concretized in a personal way, prepares Mary for her task and gives her the mobility for a consistent response. There is something that belongs to every disciple and something that belongs only to Mary.The fact that Mary’s ‘yes’ is de-privatized, socialized, and transformed into a space and substrate of community belongs to every disciple, because of that grace which elects them to participate in Christ’s mission. On the other hand, only the election of the Theotokos to motherhood belongs to Mary. It can also be observed that this community’s place is occupied, at the same time, personally and concretely, by the Mother of Jesus, who, in her mission, is thus also the Mother of her brothers.This is the mystery of Mary’s freedom. Her free ‘yes’, required by that divine freedom which definitively disposes of the world’s sense, is included, as a personal and free act, in the divine decision about the world. The question of whether Mary could or could not have escaped this cooperation is rendered obsolete in this eternal agreement of finite and infinite freedom. This agreement must be understood in the sense that Mary’s creaturely finitude, like that of any other person, but even more so because of her immaculate nature, retains a reference to a subsequent sense of meaning, to a transcendent measure of truth and love that, in its disproportions, represents the ultimate reason for human fallibility.The incomplete coincidence of the human person with the need for the infinite is resolved in Mary through that receptive relationship between the infinite love of the Son and the finite love of the Mother, which, through grace and participation, confers on the finite love of the Mother that universality and definitiveness that are proper to the mystery of the Son who entered human history. In this Mother, totally absorbed in the salvific love of the Son, the possibility of sin casts no shadow. Her redemption from original sin, which the Church’s faith links to a grace that preserves Mary from the moment of her conception, seems thus to be a manifestation of divine love.Mary’s election, desired in union with Jesus, brings a perfection of grace to the created world that would otherwise be unattainable: in Mary, not only is elected he who is preserved from all actual and original sin by Christ’s merits, but the Mother of Jesus also expresses that longing that permeates creation. In Mary, creation returns to its Creator as praise, thanksgiving, and a perfect song of love.Mary is the apex of a history of dynamic movement animated by Christ’s grace and intended to bring everything back to Him. Mary’s communion with that Spirit which is the power of the trinitarian life-giving gift in the form of a maternal alliance of God with all humanity, on the one hand, makes Mary the symbol of the new humanity brought by Christ, and on the other, configures her in the espousal terms characteristic of the Church.The Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus, and through His presence, it is Mary who changes and becomes the transparency of His love. In practice, motherhood is the personal structure that grace assumes in Mary: a motherhood in which «God is the Father», a motherhood that must be seen entirely from the perspective of transcendence, and not just in relation to the mother and her becoming a mother. Therefore, her divine motherhood is completed in the form of the Mother of all the faithful.“Dear disciples”.To deepen reflection on Mary’s reception in the Annunciation and her path of faith, consult Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Mater, which deeply analyzes Mary’s faith from the Annunciation to Pentecost.Further your studies: explore Mariology, Marian theology, Marian apparitions, and Graduate studies in Mariology.