Homily for Annunciation of the Lord

Homily for the Solemnity of the
Annunciation of the Lord

March 25, 2025
Responsory
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

I forgot to post this on the 25th—and for several days more!

The Annunciation
St. Ursula's Church, Mt. Vernon, N.Y.

“I come to do your will” (Responsory).

Running thru today’s readings is the will of God.  Isaiah strives to get Ahaz to heed God’s word and gives him a sign to help persuade him.  The psalmist finds his delight in doing God’s will (40:9).  Christ’s perfect sacrifice and sin offering is doing his Father’s will (Heb 10:4-10).  The Virgin Mary places herself at God’s service:  “May it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

God’s will is our salvation.  That’s attained when we unite ourselves to him, or perhaps better put, when we allow him to unite with us, as we prayed: “may we merit to become partakers even in his divine nature” (Collect).  Christ opened that possibility for us thru his incarnation; the Son submitted to the Father’s will by joining his divine nature to our human nature so that he might lead us Godward, so that he might lead us to delight in God’s ways and into God’s heart, so that he might fill us with God’s own love and God’s own life:  “God is with us” (Is 8:10), and we’re with God in a union of will and of life.

The Church Fathers, such as Irenaeus, spoke of our divinization, our becoming in some manner divine, “partakers even in his divine nature.”  Doesn’t the Eucharist initiate that? – our partaking of the incarnate flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus, who then consecrates (Heb 10:10) and transforms us into members of his body: “a body you prepared for me” (10:5).

May it be done to us according to his word!