Luke 1,26-38 – Feria proper of 20 December
On the journey of the Christmas Novena, the Annunciation puts us before the surprising way in which God enters history: it doesn’t force a door, it doesn’t impose a project, it doesn’t crush freedom. God asks permission. The angel does not announce a certainty already achieved, but a possibility entrusted to the fragile hands of a girl. The destiny of the world, paradoxically, passes through Mary’s freedom. “Rejoice.”
It is the first word that God speaks to her. He doesn’t tell her: “don’t be afraid”, he doesn’t tell her immediately what will happen, but he asks her to enter into a joy that she doesn’t yet see. This is how God acts with us too: he invites us to joy even before explaining why. Faith, before being understanding, is trust. Maria is upset. It doesn’t remove fear, it doesn’t pretend security. True faith does not erase the disturbance, it passes through it.
His heart is an open field, where questions and availability coexist. “How will this happen?” it is not the question of those who doubt, but of those who take seriously what God is bringing into their life. It’s the question of those who don’t run away. And then comes what turns everything upside down and which we often forget: “Nothing is impossible with God”. It doesn’t mean that everything will be easy, but that nothing is definitively closed. God does not eliminate limits, he crosses them. It doesn’t erase fragility, it inhabits it. And it is precisely there that Mary pronounces her “here I am”. Not the yes of those who control, but the yes of those who trust.
This Gospel reminds us that Christmas comes from availability. God is not born where he finds security, but where he finds space. Maria does not offer a defined project, she offers herself. And God wants only this. Perhaps we too are often full of questions, fears, unfinished things. Maybe we wait to get everything sorted out before saying yes to God. Mary shows us the opposite: we start with yes, and then God does the rest. Christmas is not God who solves all problems, but God who opens up hope in our questions. And it continues to be born every time someone, even if with total fragility, says: “Here I am”.
