The welcoming of the Annunciation and the place of faith

The welcoming of the Annunciation and the place of faith

Circumscribed by the acceptance of the saving work of God, the motherhood of Mary cannot come about without faith. That is why the scene ends with these words: behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word, in which we recognize the apex of all religious conduct before God, for Mary expresses, to the greatest degree, passive availability combined with active readiness, the deepest emptiness that accompanies the greatest fullness.

The whole tradition will reinforce this relationship between motherhood and faith to the point of making motherhood a singular form of faith and the following of faith a singular form of motherhood. To believe is thus seen as welcoming and giving Christ, as begetting Him in human history.

The work of grace is accomplished in the abandonment of a life animated and guided by faith. This faith, which Dei Verbum 5 will present as the attitude of one who se totum Deo libere committit (freely and totally entrusts himself to God), must be rightly understood: it is not first of all an act of personal thought, a creation of human intelligence, but the acceptance of divine thought, and of a thought expressed concretely in the form of a word. To believe is to open oneself to this word and to receive the whole thought that it manifests.

Mary is an exemplary model of this welcoming:

1. her listening to the Word,
2. her preserving and meditating upon it, in the image of the prophets and sages of the Old Testament.

All these characteristics allow us to make her peregrinatio fidei, pilgrimage of faith, a model for the journey of every believer. It falls to Mariology to develop the extraordinary path of this figure who is given to us in historical-midrashic terms, that is, through a history that intends to narrate the central model of the life of faith, trinitarian and ecclesial.

The encounter of the Word with Mary

In order to develop a theological understanding of the encounter between the Word and Mary, the simple biblical narrative is not enough: the encounter must be developed theologically. Since it is a matter of an encounter, it will be possible only if it is fully personal. Only personal categories will allow us to respect the singularity of the figure of Mary and her role at the side of Jesus. The Mother as model of the Daughter of Zion must be thought of not according to individualistic models, but according to communal and historical-salvific models.

Commenting on the term full of grace in the Encyclical Redemptoris Mater 8, Saint John Paul II grasps a synthesis of the revelations and promises of the Old Testament. He thus concludes that “in the mystery of Christ she is already present before the creation of the world as the 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 Spirit of holiness”.

Here we have a personalist language that, with emphasis on choice or election, draws on the vocational narratives, thus presenting Mary in the light of the call of God. Such an indication is precious because it allows us to recover some key moments of the figure of Mary in relation to the God of hesed (grace) and dabar (word): the vocation, in fact, is preceded by the election and is followed by a mission, and all three correspond in Mary to a dynamic that presents her as united in a very special and exceptional way to Christ and as loved in this eternally beloved Son.

The election of Mary

Election is a term that, in the vocational narratives, goes back to a divine decision before birth: this is what Jeremiah and Paul tell us, but, above all, it is what is said of every Christian:

God, in fact, “chose us in Him before the creation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love” (Eph 1:4).

This election does not refer to a generic divine will, but to the one that the Father manifested in sending the Son. Finally, this election is nothing other than the root of the Gospel, its eternal foundation.

Gathering the best aspects of Mariology, Saint John Paul II is the one who will treat this theme most amply, and he will do so in Redemptoris Mater 8, where, commenting on the passage of the Annunciation, he will observe that Mary is present in the mystery of Christ “already before the creation of the world”, as the 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 eternally to the Spirit of holiness. Mary is united to Christ in a very special and exceptional way, and in the same way she is eternally loved in this beloved Son, in this Son consubstantial with the Father, in whom is concentrated the whole “glory of grace”.

In no. 9 of Redemptoris Mater he will summarize these indications, concluding that

“the election of Mary is altogether exceptional and unique. Hence also the singularity of her place in the mystery of Christ”.

However, it will be in no. 11 that we discover that, as a sign of the divine election, Mary

“is placed at the center of that enmity, of 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 of 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 “her particular” means of access to the mystery of this Son, Savior of humanity. In this sense, motherhood, taking concrete shape in a personal way, prepares Mary for her task and gives her the mobility for a consistent response. There is here something that belongs to every disciple and something that belongs to Mary alone.

The fact that the yes of Mary is deprivatized, socialized, and transformed into the space and substratum of community belongs to every disciple, by virtue of that grace which elects him to share in the mission of Christ. On the other hand, only the election of the Theotókos to motherhood belongs to Mary. It can further be observed that the place of this community is at the same time occupied personally, in the most concrete way, by the mother of Jesus who in her mission is thus also the mother of His brothers.

This is the mystery of the freedom of Mary. Her free yes, required by that divine freedom which definitively determines the meaning of the world, is included, as a personal and free act, in the divine decision about the world. The question of whether or not Mary could have escaped this cooperation is surpassed in that eternal accord of finite and infinite freedom. This accord must be thought of in the sense that the creaturely finitude of Mary, like that of any other person, but still more because she is an immaculate creature, retains a reference to a further horizon of meaning, to a transcendent measure of truth and of love which, in its disproportion, represents the ultimate reason for human fallibility.

The incomplete coincidence of the human person with that need for the infinite is resolved in Mary by that receptive relationship between the infinite love of the Son and the finite love of the mother which, by grace and participation, confers on the finite love of the mother that universality and that definitiveness which are proper to the mystery of the Son who entered the human world. In this mother, wholly absorbed in the saving love of the Son, the possibility of sin casts no shadow. Her redemption from original sin, which the faith of the Church links to a grace that preserves Mary from her conception, thus appears to be a manifestation of divine love.

The election of Mary, willed in union with Jesus, gives to the created world a perfection of grace otherwise unattainable: in Mary, not only is there elected the one who is preserved from all actual and original sin by the merits of Christ, but in the Mother of Jesus there is also expressed that yearning which pervades 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 dynamism animated by the grace of Christ and destined to bring everything back to Him. The communion of Mary with that Spirit who is the power of the gift of trinitarian life in the form of a maternal covenant 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 spousal terms characteristic of the Church.

The Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus, and by virtue of 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 in the perspective of transcendence, and not only in relation to what concerns the mother and her becoming a mother. For this reason, her divine motherhood is completed in the form of the mother of all the faithful,

“beloved disciples”.

To deepen the reflection on Mary’s welcoming at the Annunciation and her journey of faith, consult the encyclical Redemptoris Mater by John Paul II, which analyzes in depth the faith of Mary from the Annunciation to Pentecost.

Deepen your studies: explore Mariology, Marian Theology, Marian apparitions, and the Postgraduate Program in Mariology.