Monday, April 04, 2016

Feast of the Annunciation – April 4, 2016 (because Good Friday and the Annunciation of Our Lady fell on the same day: the date of the Incarnation of God and the date of His death].


1)      Our Lady is the first Christian believer. What she has done is the meaning of Christian faith. The absence of sin in her made her capable of saying “Yes” to the invitation to receive God in her, and to give Him a complete humanity. All the humanity of Christ [soul, body, faculties of intellect and will, etc.] are all from her. Not that she creates the soul of Christ, but the egg from her and therefore all the DNA must have an organizing principle reasoned to by the Greeks, and that must be present for the material of the body to be body.  The soul, however, is not the Person. The soul is created; the Person is uncreated. The gift that she was asked to give was her entire humanity. Any demurral in her faith would have meant a lack in Christ’s humanity, which would have jeopardized a full redemption.

2)      Consider that Christ wants to be incarnated  again  - and over and over again – throughout history in each one of us. If you make the same gift of yourself as she, and you therefore become Ipse Christus, Creation has achieved the fullness of its meaning.

3)      This act of faith is not ideological but anthropological. Faith is not a book you can put in your pocket. It is a living act of divinization whereby you become what you were meant to be: God as Son of God, “another Christ.” Faith as obedience set the Jews apart as “the People of God.” It creates a culture, a people. Sokolowski writes:

“The Jewish religious understanding was centered on Yahweh, who was taken to be different from any of the gods worshipped by other nations. The understanding, however, did not concern only God; it also concerned God as having elected Israel and as having made a Covenant with them, a Covenant that raised them to responsibility and obligation and not just to privilege. The understanding was about God in his actions, about the people toward whom he acts, and about the world as a setting for these actions. In all this the Jews sharply distinguished themselves and their God from other people and their gods; indeed, the myriad distinctions enjoined by the Torah – between different kinds of animals and different kinds of food, different periods of time, different forms of clothing and utensils – may have been not just ceremonial rubrics or practices useful for preserving health and public order; they may have served as a training for the Jews in the very habit of seeing that this is not that, so that they would be all the more able to realize that ‘they, the other nations, are not ‘us,’ because their ‘gods’ are not Yahweh…

                NOW, “Within this Jewish tradition, which had already distinguished itself so sharply from the others, another distinction was drawn when Christ and his Church appeared. The new distinction, between the New Covenant and the Old, was not like that between Israel and the Gentiles. The God of the New Covenant is the same as that of the Old. The Father whom Jesus addresses is not somehow the truth of which Yahweh is only the shadow: the Father by whom and from whom Jesus was sent is Yahweh, And yet a slight new distinction is drawn between the God  who could not eer become part of this creation – it would be degrading to hm and blasphemous to make him part of what he created – and the God who became incarnate. It isnot just that we must now distinguish between the Father and the Son, but that we must now distinguish a deeper sense of the divinity, a deeper sense of the Godhead. It is not another and different God, as Yahweh is other than and different from the ‘elohim, from Baal and Moloch and Zeus, but it is the same God newly understood. No new proper name is revealed, but Yahweh is now called Father in a distinctive way; he is called Father instead of being called Yahweh. There is a change in the way the transcendence of God is understood. Not only does God create the world and sustain it, not only does God act toward his people, but he also enters into his creation, without diminishing his divinity. He is so transcendent that even this will not compromise the God-head. The Old Covenant educated Israel in the transcendence of God by preventing any embodiment of the divinity, even any image of it. This pedagogy was necessary to distinguish Yahweh from the gods of the Gentiles. But in Christ the New Covenant shows that God could become incarnate, that he could humble himself and take on the form of fallen man and become obedient even to death on the cross, and this humiliation, rather than dishonoring the divine majesty, showed forth its glory in a way that no other act of power could have done.[1]





[1] Robert Sokolowski, “Eucharistic Presence,” CUA (1994) 144-147.

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