An unwanted interruption, a sigh, my eyes roll back, I force a smile, then, “Sure, let me get the car.” This was a damp, foggy Sunday morning years ago, when a brother asked me to take him driving around the property. He was a bit unsure of himself after an injury and wanted some practice behind the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat; we didn’t speak much. He was intent, maneuvering carefully down north road, then around to south. I gazed out the windows transfixed. There was a breathtaking, most delicate beauty all around us. Our hills and fields were wrapped in deep fog, as we inched along through what seemed a Japanese watercolor painting, thick mist resting on early spring trees, droplets on the branches’ delicate tracery. Hills and fields would disappear and then softly emerge into view. A mystical ride, unexpected and experienced only because a brother rudely interrupted my morning routine, as he relaxed with relief and good pleasure and found his flow behind the wheel.
This morning we celebrate the great feast of divine interruption. Mary opens herself to God’s intrusion, an angelic messenger, an invasion of grace. Mary is the spring meadow heavy with soft mist, enveloped by God’s fair Shekinah, God’s Spirit overshadowing her. Amazed at what the angel calls her “favor with God,” nonetheless, her faith allows, her faith sees grace in the interruption. Her faith enables God to take her. Our faith. This is always God’s way; it’s what Jesus her Son will always say when a healing takes place, Your faith has made you well. Mary’s faith in the God of outlandish proposals and promises, enables God’s dream to become reality, real flesh. God’s proposal depends on her cooperation and thus exalts her nature.
It is Mary’s faith that allows God to take our flesh, so that he can transform, reform, inform it with his love and tender mercy and bring it to new resurrected life. This has been God’s intention from the beginning., this incomprehensible, unjustifiable love, which now can come to full fruition because of Mary’s cooperation. Her flesh given to God will enable God to save us from the trap of our sin-proneness. Mercy grows and swells within her, her blood is his blood, the blood that will heal and redeem us, that will gush with water from his pierced side.
Unlike two despondent disciples on their way to Emmaus, Mary of Nazareth is not slow of heart to believe. Her virginal emptiness, her utter poverty, is our poverty, even our sinfulness and emptiness made a great empty space that God can fill with himself. Mary invites us to go down into the dark recesses of our own hearts and discover there a great emptiness that God can fill. Through Mary all the dark ambiguity and all the empty incongruities of our lives are pregnant with presence and possibility.
With her we encounter the baffling extravagance of God’s desire for us. Our surrender is the secret we were born for, to be totally defenseless in the face of God’s offering of himself; utterly nonresistant to God’s desire for our bodies, our hearts, our wills, our memories, our whole selves. Mary shows us how to how to fall backwards into this desire, how to receive with joy what we cannot, will never understand; to surrender to the Mystery of God’s unfathomable predilection for each of us in our own particular poverty and smallness. Mary allows the lovely dewy fog of divine tenderness to envelop her. She invites us to do the same - allow God to interrupt us with the ridiculous truth of his favor.
