We celebrate this morning Mary’s gift of her body to God. She gives him
her flesh. Because of her, he has hands that will heal and bless and be nailed
to the wood of the cross. Because of her, he has a heart to love with, a heart
that will gashed open by a cruel lance.*
If as Pope Francis reminds us
over and over again, we must go to the fringes to be with the poor and
forgotten, it is because that is where God is. That is where God goes to find
Mary, among the poorest and most powerless. And each of us must go down there to
the fringes, to the frontiers of our own poverty and emptiness. For our poverty
and emptiness make God happy, not because he wants us sad but because they
allow God to fill us with himself, which is all he really wants to do. Down in
the dark recesses of our hearts, we discover like Mary a great empty space where
God’s mercy can grow and swell in us, a space that he can fill with his own gracious
presence.
God in Christ desires to
surrender himself to us. It is the secret we were born for. And our unending
work is to let ourselves be defenseless, utterly defenseless, like Mary, in the
face of such self-offering; utterly nonresistant to God’s desire for us, for
our body, our whole selves.
Formed and nurtured under the
pliant, loving heart of Mary, Jesus will do as his Mother did and give his
whole body over to God, in loving obedience to his Father’s desire to save us
from our selfishness and sin. It is what we will watch him do next week in the
horror of his passion; it is what he does for us each morning in the Eucharist: give us the body that was given to him by the Virgin Mary.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Annunciation, 1898, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
*See Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God.
*See Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God.