The Story Of The Annunciation Of The Lord

The Solemnity of the Annunciation celebrates the actual Incarnation of Our Savior — the Word made flesh in the womb of His mother, Mary — and is a principal Marian feast. Two other feasts honoring Our Lord’s mother, the Assumption (Aug. 15), and the Immaculate Conception (Dec. 8), are celebrated as Holy Days of Obligation in the United States. The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, is a third that is also a Holy Day of Obligation unless it falls on a Saturday or a Monday.

The biblical account of the Annunciation is in the first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke — which describes the news given to Mary that she was to become the mother of the Incarnation of God — records the “angelic salutation” of Gabriel to Mary, ‘Hail, thou who art highly favored. The Lord is with thee” (the origin of the repeated “Hail Mary” prayer of the Rosary) and Mary’s response to God’s will, “Let it be done to me according to thy word.”

Her exultant hymn, the Magnificat, found in Luke 1:46-55, has been part of the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours, at Vespers (evening prayer), and has been repeated nightly in churches, convents, and monasteries for many centuries.

With the incarnation, God has become one of us. From all eternity God had decided that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity should become human. Now, as Luke 1:26-38 tells us, the decision is being realized. The God-Man embraces all humanity to bring it to God in one great act of love. Because human beings have rejected God, Jesus will accept a life of suffering and an agonizing death: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

Together with Jesus, the privileged and graced Mary is the link between heaven and earth. She is the human being who best, after Jesus, exemplifies the possibilities of human existence. She shows how an ordinary human being can reflect God in the ordinary circumstances of life. She exemplifies what the Church and every member of the Church is meant to become and she manifests what the Incarnation is meant to accomplish for all of us.