Jarosław Kupczak OP
The only biblical source in which we can find a description of what happened at the Annunciation is the Gospel according to St. Luke 1:26-38. The author of the account, a physician from Syrian Antioch, was probably baptized by Paul around 50AD, during the latter’s second missionary journey. From then on, Luke was one of Paul’s most faithful companions. It is in the first chapters of Luke’s Gospel that we find an account of events that is not present in other New Testament writings: the annunciation to Zechariah that he would become the father of John the Baptist, the Annunciation of Mary, Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth, the account of the birth of John the Baptist, the account of the birth of Christ while the Holy Family travelled to Jerusalem, the circumcision of Jesus, the presentation of Jesus in the temple with the prophecies of Simeon and Anna, the losing of twelve-year-old Jesus during the Holy Family’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Due to how detailed the information regarding the childhood of Jesus was, Christian tradition pointed to the fact that Luke must have heard about those events from Mary. The first two chapters of his Gospel are thus a record of how those extremely important events in the history of salvation were remembered by the Blessed Virgin Mary half a century later.
The biblical description of the Annunciation expresses, in a very laconic form, truths fundamentally important for understanding the mystery of the Incarnation. Six months after her cousin Elizabeth conceived John the Baptist, God sent the angel Gabriel to Mary to announce to her that she would become the Mother of the “Son of the Most High” who would be King of Israel and whose name would be Jesus, which in Hebrew means “God saves”. In his description of the Annunciation, St. Luke calls Mary a virgin (parthenos in Greek); hence, Mary’s doubt expressed in the conversation with the angel concerned the very possibility of conceiving a son. In response, this teenage girl heard that the Holy Spirit would come upon her and the power of the Most High would overshadow her. At the end of the conversation, Mary gave her fiat: “Behold, the Lord’s bond-servant; may it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
What happened at the moment of Annunciation? In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed, Christians confess: “Who for us men and for our salvation came down from Heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man”.[1] Who is the One who “came down from Heaven”? That question is answered by the first part of the creed: “One Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-Begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages; Light of Light; True God of True God; begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father”. He is the eternal Son of God himself, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, who descended from heaven to become man.
A further question may be posed: How did the “coming down from heaven” of God’s eternal Son come about? Answering Mary’s question about the possibility of conceiving a Son: “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34), the Angel speaks of the power of the Holy Spirit: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you” (Luke 1:35). “The Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the giver of Life”, is sent to sanctify the womb of the Virgin Mary and divinely fecundate it, causing her to conceive the eternal Son of the Father in a humanity drawn from her own.”[2] The Annunciation is a trinitarian event, a trinitarian epiphany: the Father sends the Spirit for the conception of the Son.[3]
The Incarnation is therefore the descent of God into the world. The ancient tradition of the Church described it in two ways. The theological school associated with Alexandria used the Logos – sarks pattern, echoed in the words of the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John: “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Such an approach to the Incarnation might be misleading (as is the term itself: “Incarnation”), because the eternal God not only took flesh from the Virgin Mary; he accepted much more – the whole human nature, and therefore also the human soul, will, reason, psyche. Hence another ancient Christological school, the Antiochian one, used the Logos – anthropos (the Word becomes man) pattern to describe the Incarnation.
The above-quoted excerpt from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed points to God’s purpose and motive for the Incarnation; it happened “for us men and for our salvation”. That ancient proper nos means that “The Word became flesh for us in order to save us by reconciling us with God”.[4] Salvation is meant to heal the wounds of original sin and actual sins, as Gregory of Nyssa indicates: “Our diseased nature needed a healer. Man in his fall needed one to set him upright. (…) The captive sought for a ransomer, the fettered prisoner for someone to take his part, and for a deliverer he who was held in the bondage of slavery.”[5] Nevertheless, the purpose of the Incarnation was not only to restore us to the paradise state from before original sin. Commenting on the “bold” statement of St. Peter that the Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), Thomas Aquinas, known for his precise statements, said: “Since it was the will of God’s only-begotten Son that men should share in his divinity, he assumed our nature in order that by becoming man he might make men gods (ut homines deos faceret)”.[6]
When considering the Incarnation, Christians have always asked why that event, the most important one in the history of mankind, took place in that specific place and time. St. Paul tried to answer that question in his Epistle to the Galatians: “But when the fullness of the time (Gr. pleroma) came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters” (Galatians 4:4-5). The use of the term “the fullness of the time” to indicate the moment of the Annunciation suggests that the entire history of the universe and humanity was a form of preparation for the Incarnation.
In Christian theology, that historical preparation has been explained in various ways. In medieval theology, there was a difference between the Dominican and Franciscan schools in answering the question: if Adam had not sinned, would the Son of God have still become man? In other words, was Adam’s sin the actual cause of the Incarnation? Thomas Aquinas gives a positive answer to that question, while Duns Scotus supplies a negative one.[7]
According to Thomas Aquinas, Revelation teaches us that the Incarnation occurred because of man’s sin, and its purpose was to save humanity from destruction, which was the effect of sin.[8] According to Duns Scotus, the Incarnation corresponds to the desire of God’s love to be as close to man as possible, and would have happened even if man had not sinned.[9]
Regardless of those theological differences within Catholic orthodoxy, we should view the Incarnation as prepared from the beginning of time. This is what St. Paul wrote in the Epistle to the Ephesians: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will (…) He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He set forth in Him, regarding His plan of the fullness of the times (pleroma)” (Ephesians 1:3-5, 9-10).
The moment of the Annunciation was prepared by the eternal Wisdom of God together with the creation. That truth is markedly presented in one of the sculptures from the portal of the cathedral in Reims, France. It shows the moment of Adam’s creation. According to Christian theology, it is God’s Logos, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, who moulds Adam from clay. Thus the sculptor is Christ, and the Adam moulded by Him has a face similar to the face of the One who creates him. So it was not Christ who was created in the image of Adam; it was Adam who was created in the image of the One who was to come and be born of Mary.
This preparation of creation for the Incarnation is best shown in the figure of Mary. In the above-quoted passage from the Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul emphasises that it was God himself who initiated the Incarnation: “God sent his Son” (Galatians 4:4). Nevertheless, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains the divine-human synergy of the Incarnation, in order to “prepare a body” for Him (Hebrews 10:5), He wanted the creature to freely cooperate. To this end, since all eternity God had chosen a daughter of Israel, a young Jewish woman from Nazareth in Galilee, a virgin betrothed “to a man whose name was Joseph, of the descendants of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary” (Luke 1:26-27), to be the Mother of His Son.[10] Mary, a daughter of the Chosen People, stands between the Old and New Covenants; she embodies both the expectation and longing for the coming of the Messiah, and the joy of his coming (Magnificat).
In the scene of the Annunciation, Mary’s faith is particularly noteworthy, as she accepts the words of the angel Gabriel while not fully understanding their meaning. Hence to describe Mary’s faith, the Catechism of the Catholic Church uses the biblical term “obedience of faith” (cf. Romans 1:5, 16:26), comparing her to Abraham. Abraham is the model of such “obedience of faith”; “[t]he Virgin Mary is its most perfect embodiment”.[11] Like Abraham, setting an example for all believers, Mary trusted in God and went “out to a place which she was to receive for an inheritance; and she left, not knowing where she was going” (cf. Hebrews 11:8).
Mary was prepared by God’s grace to show obedience to God by faith and to become the Mother of God’s Son. That preparation is indicated by the words of the angel’s greeting: “Greetings, favoured one” (chaire kecharitomene; Luke 1:28). Reflecting over the centuries of her history on that “favour” or “fullness of grace”, the Church came to the conclusion that it concerned the very conception of Mary, which saved her from the stain (macula) of original sin and the status of a sinner, in which every human being is born. Summarising the Church’s long tradition of piety and faith, in 1854 Pius IX promulgated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary: “the most Blessed Virgin Mary (…) in the first instant of the soul’s infusion into the body, was, by a special grace and privilege of God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, her Son and the Redeemer of the human race, preserved free from all stain of original sin”.[12]
Mary is the second Eve. Through the word of the Annunciation, the second creation takes place. The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of the Second Vatican Council puts it thusly: “For, as St. Irenaeus says, she “being obedient, became the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race.” Hence not a few of the early Fathers gladly assert in their preaching, “The knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience; what the virgin Eve bound through her unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosened by her faith”. Comparing Mary with Eve, they call her “the Mother of the living”, and still more often they say: “death through Eve, life through Mary”.[13]
An important theme for understanding Mary and the manner in which the Incarnation occurred is Mary’s virginity. Already in the first Creeds of Faith, the Church stated that Jesus was conceived solely “by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary”, without the intervention of a man.[14] “[T]he Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit”, says the angel to Joseph about Mary, his wife (Matthew 1:20). As the Catechism emphasises, the Gospel narratives indicate that the virginal conception is “a divine work that surpasses all human understanding and possibility”.[15]
It is worth remembering that Christians professed the virgin conception of Christ in the world of licentious sexuality of Roman civilization. They professed that countercultural truth despite the fact that it met – as it does today – with misunderstanding and ridicule of their contemporaries. It is in this context that the words of Ignatius of Antioch are understandable: “Now the virginity of Mary was hidden from the prince of this world, as was also her offspring, and the death of the Lord; three mysteries of renown, which were wrought in silence by God.”[16]
Mary’s virginity above all indicates the truth that God is the only Father of Jesus.[17] In the scene of the Annunciation, that truth is expressed by the fact that, on behalf of God himself, it is the angel Gabriel who names Mary’s son: Jesus (Yoshua, Yehoshua, Yoshe). It was customary in the local culture that the father named his son; the name Jesus is thus given to the Child by the eternal God. In Semitic culture, a name always expresses a person’s identity and mission; Jesus in Hebrew means “God saves”.
The name of God in Israel was so sacred it was not allowed to be said. That was only done once a year, by the high priest on the day of atonement (Yom Kippur), when, after sprinkling the blood of the sacrifice in the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies, he invoked the name of God the Saviour in reparation for the sins of Israel.[18] “The name “Jesus” signifies that the very name of God is present in the person of his Son, made man for the universal and definitive redemption from sins.”[19] As the Acts of the Apostles put it: “there is no other name under heaven that has been given among mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
[1] The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is the fruit of the first two Ecumenical Councils, in 325 and 381; it takes its name from them. The Apostles’ Creed speaks much more laconically of the scene of the Annunciation than the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed: “who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born by the Virgin Mary.” The Apostles’ Creed is the ancient creed of the Roman Church; it is considered to be a summary of the faith of the Apostles.
[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church 485 (hereafter as CCC).
[3] In his evangelisation speech, Peter thus says about Christ: “God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power (dynamis)” (Acts 10:38). Jesus is anointed. That is the meaning of the Hebrew word Messiah, which is translated Christos in Greek.
[4] CCC 457.
[5] Oratio Catechetica 15.
[6] St. Thomas Aquinas, Opusculum 57 in Festo Corporis Christi 1. Many similar statements can be found in the works of the Fathers of the Church: “For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God.” (St. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses III 19, 1). Similarly, St. Athanasius stated: “For He was made man that we might be made God” (De incarnatione 54, 3).
[7] Cf. G.L. Müller, Catholic Dogmatics for the Study and Practice of Theology, transl. W. Hadfield-Burkardt, chap. III.3 “The Creation Theology of High Scholasticism”.
[8] Cf. Summa Theologiae III 1, 3.
[9] Cf. Reportatio Parisiensis III 7, 3; Ordinatio III 7, 3.
[10] CCC 488.
[11] CCC 144.
[12] Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus.
[13] Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, 56.
[14] Cf. CCC 496.
[15] CCC 497.
[16] Epistula ad Ephesios 19, 1.
[17] Mary’s virginity is also an expression of her total dedication to God. As an expression of love and respect, the Church honours Mary as Aeiparthenos, “ever Virgin” (semper Virgo).
[18] Cf. Leviticus 16:15–16; Sirach 50:20; Hebrews 9:7.
[19] CCC 432.
