The Annunciation

Working with other people is hard. I once had to help some friends move another friend’s storage boxes into a garage. It was all we could do to fit everything into that garage; every last inch was used. After hours of work, we showed our friend the results, but all she could say was: “Well! I distinctly requested an aisle through the boxes!”

God seems to love working with others, though, even with those of us who are maddeningly, frustratingly recalcitrant in our resistance to God’s Spirit. The Old Testament shows this time and again, from Abraham and Sarah through David to Jeremiah, the people called by God were constantly refusing to cooperate with God, and yet God continued to invite them into working together with Him. How tempting it might have been for us to obliterate the freedom of these flawed individuals and impose our will like a dictator, or give up and sink back into binging the latest show on our playlist…

And yet God resists that impulse. God invites but always respects our freedom to accept or reject his offer of love. Denise Levertov’s poem on the Annunciation captures this freedom of Mary’s “fiat” (Latin for ‘let it be so’): “The engendering Spirit did not enter her without consent./ God waited./ She was free/ to accept or to refuse, choice/ integral to humanness.” Even with the fate of the Cosmos at stake, God never forced Mary to bend to God’s will but always respected her choice over whether to accept her ministry of rebellion (Miriam means ‘rebellion’) against all the Caesars and Empires of history, to bear the weapon that God would use to “cast down the mighty from their thrones,” to fill the hungry with good things, but send the rich away empty.

It seems to me that this love of cooperation rather than coercion ought to impact everything in our lives, from “synodality” in our churches, to the participation of students in their own learning, to our relations to coworkers, to the way we function in our families, to the way we approach those we perceive as marginal. God, after all, is not a lonely dictator, but a communion of Persons, in which the Father is the Source of Son and Spirit, but is never in competition with them, and never dominates them. Let’s become like God.

Author: Matt Erickson, Theology