The Annunciation by John Donne
These are troubling times. Daily life is disrupted, suspended even, for many. For others difficult decisions and personal danger lie ahead. The pace at which the Government makes announcements is dizzying and often frightening. I suspect that there are very few of us who have not spent time reflecting upon our lives and the fact of our own mortality – one thing which all of us have in common by virtue of our humanity.
I cannot pretend that I am yet able to make full theological sense of what is happening around the world and in our country as a result of the impact of Covid-19. Events are moving too quickly and the scope of what is happening is very difficult, if not impossible, to understand.
However, today’s Feast of the Annunciation, the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary in Nazareth, does offer us something immediate. Through Mary’s response, “be it done to me according to your will,” the divine becomes fully human. God shares in our humanity. In Donne’s words, that which cannot die takes on the flesh which death’s force may try. God becomes one of us, standing in complete solidarity with us, up to and including death.
We are so familiar with this story that it is possible to miss something of the scale of the paradox at the heart of the Incarnation. Donne’s poem is powerful because he does not just point this paradox out, but rather revels in it, gleefully drawing attention the reality that Mary is her Maker’s maker, conceiver the one who conceived her and her Father’s Mother. Donne, therefore, gives us a glimpse of the immensity of God’s intervention in human history and the joy which it brings.
And it is that joy, arising from the cloistering in her dear womb of that Immensity which existed before time itself, that continues to be a light proclaiming even in these dark days that salvation to all who will is nigh.
Tomos Reed, Curate
