"Behold the Handmaid of the Lord!"

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation! Mary says "yes" to God's plan for our salvation--your salvation and mine! Yes--the salvation of the entire world: saint and sinner, criminal and law-abiding citizens of every nation on earth, men and women of every race, of every nationality, of every ethnicity!

Imagine being a 13 or 14 year-old Jewish teenager engaged to her future husband, Joseph!  Suddenly, standing before her is an angel "sent from God," Luke tells us in today's Gospel. Mary was greatly troubled, Luke tells us!  Coming toward her, the angel says: "Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you."  Mary, I imagine, must have said to herself: "What's going on here? Am I going crazy? Am I hallucinating? Help."   Seeing Mary's reaction, the angels says to her: "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his Kingdom there will be no end." And Mary simply asks "How will this happen? I have had no relations with a man!" And the angels responds: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God...."  Hearing the angel's response, Mary says: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to hour word." What faith! What humility! What courage! Mary knows that in her culture that a woman pregnant outside of marriage could be stoned to death!  So, how does she handle this possibility? How does she tell Joseph  to whom she is engaged? How does she tell her parents and her friends?  We do not know the answer to those questions but we do know that Mary had faith and faith moves mountains, even the mountains of possible death!

Grant it, I am not Mary, But  what if, as I am doing my chores, I look up and there, not only stands an angel but he says to me: "Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you!"  Thoughts such as the following might flood my mind:  "What? Am I going crazy? Am I hallucinating? What's going on?" And the angel says: "Do not be afraid...for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and  bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus...."  My thoughts: "Wait a minute! I've not had no relations with a man! Get pregnant? These have got to be auditory hallucinations!  I need help!" But the angel reassures me when I asked how any of this could possibly happen. The angel responds: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you...."

You and I, like Mary, have faced difficult situations, have been asked to do things that, no way, could we have accomplished without divine intervention!  God does not asks us to do anything that He does not equip us to to or that He does not remove  the obstacles to the tasks being accomplished in His name, we we, too, are God's handmaidens and sons!