Mary: Chosen to Give Birth to the Son of God

In today’s Gospel, Luke 1: 26-38, we read about the Annunciation. The angel Gabriel announces the good news that Mary has “won favor with God,” and has been chosen to give birth to the Messiah, the long-awaited One who is to “rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his Kingdom there will be no end.”  “Behold,” the angel says to Mary, “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…”  How[, you ask?] 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.”

Gabriel is saying:  Mary, the child you will conceive is God taking on the nature of a human being through your body.  The child you will conceive in your womb is the Son of God made flesh.  You are to call him “Jesus,” for He is the Savior spoken of by the prophets throughout the Hebrews Scriptures!

Through our baptism, God enters our very being, as He entered Mary womb. God dwells within us as within a sacred Temple.  Mary, in the Franciscan tradition, is hailed as God’s Tabernacle, God’s Palace (cf. the Common of the Blessed Mother in the Franciscan Breviary).  Like Mary, who brings Jesus into the world physically, we are commissioned at our baptism to give “birth” to Jesus spiritually in all that we do and say and desire. How? By our works of love and compassion, mercy and forgiveness, generosity and peace, joy and hope. May we respond to this baptismal call, not only on Christmas Day, but throughout the year.  Overshadowed by the Holy Spirit at our baptism, confirmation, through the sacrament of reconciliation and at every Eucharist, we are empowered to give birth to Jesus in our world each day, transforming darkness into light, hatred into love, violence into peace.