Feast day: March 25
The Annunciation of the Lord
The angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the Son of God, and her 'yes' becomes the hinge of history — God taking flesh in her womb.
The Annunciation, kept on March 25 — nine months exactly before Christmas — celebrates the moment on which the whole of salvation turns: the announcement by the angel Gabriel to a young woman of Nazareth that she was to become the mother of the Son of God. It is not chiefly a feast of Mary's birth or death, but of the instant of the Incarnation itself, when, at her consent, the Word became flesh.
The angel greeted her, the Gospel of Luke records, with words that have echoed in Christian prayer ever since: 'Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you.' Troubled, Mary was told not to be afraid, for she had found favor with God and would conceive and bear a son, Jesus, who would be called the Son of the Most High and reign forever. When she asked how this could be, since she had no husband, Gabriel answered that the Holy Spirit would overshadow her.
Everything waited on her reply. The Church has always seen in this moment a kind of holding of the breath of all creation — God, having willed to become man, awaiting the free 'yes' of a creature. And Mary gave it: 'Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.'
With those words the Son of God took flesh in her womb. For this reason the Angelus, prayed three times a day at the ringing of the bell, recalls the Annunciation, and at the words 'and the Word was made flesh' the faithful bow or kneel — honoring the mystery that began in a quiet room in Nazareth and changed the history of the world.
Nine months before Christmas to the day, the Church celebrates the moment of the Incarnation itself — not Jesus' birth, but his conception.
“Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.”
— The Annunciation of the Lord
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/01541c.htm
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