Saturday, March 25 : Saint John-Paul II

[In reply] to the aspirations of the human spirit in search of God… the “fullness of time” emphasizes the response of God himself… The sending of this Son, one in substance with the Father, as a man “born of woman” (Ga 4:4), constitutes the culminating and definitive point of God’s self-revelation to humanity… A woman is to be found at the centre of this salvific event. The self-revelation of God, who is the inscrutable unity of the Trinity, is outlined in the Annunciation at Nazareth. “Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High” – “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” – “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… For with God nothing will be impossible”. It may be easy to think of this event in the setting of the history of Israel, the chosen people of which Mary is a daughter, but it is also easy to think of it in the context of all the different ways in which humanity has always sought to answer the fundamental and definitive questions which most beset it. Do we not find in the Annunciation at Nazareth the beginning of that definitive answer by which God himself “attempts to calm people’s hearts”? It is not just a matter here of God’s words revealed through the Prophets; rather with this response “the Word is truly made flesh” (Jn 1:14). Hence Mary attains a union with God that exceeds all the expectations of the human spirit. It even exceeds the expectations of all Israel, in particular the daughters of this chosen people, who, on the basis of the promise, could hope that one of their number would one day become the mother of the Messiah. Who among them, however, could have imagined that the promised Messiah would be “the Son of the Most High”? On the basis of the Old Testament’s monotheistic faith such a thing was difficult to imagine. Only by the power of the Holy Spirit, who “overshadowed” her, was Mary able to accept what is “impossible with men, but not with God” (Mk 10: 27).

Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team

---