The Annunciation: Celebrating the Ultimate Pro-Life Feast Day
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On this great Feast of the Annunciation of the Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Ark of the New Covenant, becomes a house for God, not made by human hands but consecrated by the Holy Ghost Himself. Many people today, including not a few devout and knowledgeable Christians, see Christmas as the day when Christ entered the world, when His Incarnation began. But this is not the case. Christmas was only the culmination and eucatastrophe of His nine months in the tabernacle of the Blessed Virgin, when she introduced Him to the world as its Savior.
The Incarnation of Christ actually occurred at the Annunciation, when the Holy Ghost, in remembrance of His creation of life in the waters of Genesis, overshadowed Mary and created a radically new life, one utterly free from sin and inextricably united with God, a preview and foretaste of God’s providential plan for all men. The first participant in this union is Mary herself, from whose body the Body of Christ was taken and whose very blood became the Blood of Christ in her womb. Like other human mothers, her food became His food, His immune system boosted her immune system - in a word, Mary became the first Christian as one fully incorporated into the Body of Christ, conformed to the Son of God borne within her.
This is an especially important point for Christians to remember and preach to the world today. The Annunciation is the ultimate pro-life holiday. It is the true Advent of Christ’s mission on Earth, just as the life of every human person begins at conception. Christ was not a “blob of tissue” or merely a part of Mary’s body prior to Christmas. As St. John the Baptist recognized when he leapt in the womb of his mother Elizabeth, Jesus was fully God and fully man from His conception at the Annunciation, when He was only a single-celled zygote with His own unique DNA and human soul created immediately by God.
To say that an unborn child is not human, or that a mother is free to murder her child if she feels like it, is to say that Mary would have been free to murder Jesus in her womb, that He was not truly human until Christmas or that His right to life was totally subordinate to her feelings and convenience. This is a diabolical lie and a blasphemy. By becoming an unborn child, God united Himself with all the unborn, identifying Himself with them in His humanity and ensuring the sanctity of all their lives. To harm them, or to encourage others to do so - much less to make the Sign of the Cross in support of it, as did our “Catholic” former president - is thus a sin against God Himself, one whose blood cries out for vengeance like that of Abel.
Like those living in Nazi Germany, we live today in countries where the genocidal slaughter of a whole class of people is perpetrated in our own neighborhoods, except now, it is the most helpless and innocent who are killed, torn apart and used for experiments, not hidden but publicly celebrated and not enforced by tyrannical overlords but freely chosen by their own mothers and supposed doctors. It takes a true cognitive dissonance to live in such a society and act as if everything is good and normal, rather than being overwhelmed with the demonic evil all around us.
At His first coming, Christ appeared as an unborn child, then as a helpless newborn at Christmas, entirely dependent upon His own creatures, defenseless before the evils of the world. Throughout His earthly mission, He sought only to teach and to forgive, not to judge. But when He returns, having come into His kingdom, He will reign as king and judge over all:
And when the Son of man shall come in his majesty, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit upon the seat of his majesty. And all nations shall be gathered together before him, and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. (Mt 25:31-33 DRA)
May God have mercy on us all.
(Cover image source: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2806781186055145&id=1392261317507146&set=a.1580944795305463)
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