I have to admit, I have a liturgical-calendar pet peeve. We celebrate Advent in December, then
Christmas and the Christmas season for a few days, and many years after only a
few weeks we move right into Lent.
Following the Easter season there is a long period of Ordinary
Time. Sometimes it’s like Jesus
was just born and he is already on the cross! The reality is, we are confined in a 365 day calendar and it
isn’t always the smoothest fitting in all the feasts in the way we may like.
Yet
there is something cool about Christmas and Easter being so close in our
calendar. Jesus was born to
die. I remember a line from Harry
Potter in which Snape told Dumbledore, “You have raised a pig to only be
slaughtered.” Now obviously Jesus
is not a pig (he is a Lamb, though!) he did come to die for our sins.
This
same tension is here today. We are
in the midst of the Lenten season—a season where we journey to the cross—yet today
we celebrate the Annunciation of our Lord—the moment he was conceived in his
mother’s womb. We must always hold
these two mysteries—the incarnation and the passion—together.
And
we must not forget that Mary’s yes
made it possible for Jesus to come to die.
Another awesome reality is the fulfilled prophecy from
Isaiah: “Therefore the Lord himself
will give you this sign: the virgin shall be with child, and
bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel, which
means ‘God is with us!’” Within a flip of the page and a couple of minutes we hear
the fulfillment in Gabriel’s announcement to Mary. Yet the time between the prophecy and its fulfillment were
seven or eight hundred years apart.
Think about that—seven or eight hundred years! Not only was our country not formed that long ago, but it
was centuries away from its establishment.
As we take a break from our Lenten penance to rejoice in
the incarnation, may we strive to remember the connection between Jesus’ birth
and death. And like Mary, may we
always say yes to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment