Sermons & Homilies
How do we sum up a life? How do we encapsulate a person’s whole being into a few words? Often, we are at a loss at a funeral to fully depict the life of the person being commemorated. We try our best with anecdotes, with words of advice that have stuck with us. And so it is fitting today, when we celebrate not the death, but the passing over from death to Life of the Most Holy Theotokos, to find a way to sum up her life. I would offer her own words, the words she gave in response to the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation, as perhaps the most succinct and perfect summation of the life of our Panagia.
Our feast today is called Annunciation, in Greek εὐαγγελισμός. It means no ordinary proclamation but the preaching of good news, glad tidings, of the gospel. Accordingly, the Angel Gabriel begins his salutation to the Virgin with the greeting, “Rejoice!” And as we heard in the Synaxarion reading last night, this feast is above all else a feast of joy: “Rejoice, thou through whom joy will shine forth! Rejoice, thou through whom the curse will cease!” The Mother of God herself is called the “joyous one” throughout the hymns of the Church.
A dove and a rainbow followed the flood, the Promised Land followed forty years of wandering in the desert, resurrection followed the widow of Zarephath’s trust in the Prophet, the stanching of blood followed twelve years of ritual impurity, and walking followed a lifetime of paralysis alongside the pool of Siloam. Today, an instrument of torture gives life as all the references to the Cross of Christ are paralleled with His rising from the dead.
We all have a choice before us: will we willingly accept suffering and death for the sake of the love of God, and so behold those very things being transformed into joy and blessedness and life eternal? Or will we run and hide from suffering and death — only to find, at the end of all things, that we cannot run and hide any longer, and that having refused to meet Christ in them, we are left with suffering and death alone, forever stripped of Christ and of all meaning? To suffer and to die are inevitable. Our only choice is for what we will suffer, and to what we will die.
