The Wedding Banquet
March 25, 2025
Hello! How is each and every one? Happy Feast day!!! Today we are celebrating the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord. “The Annunciation to Mary inaugurates ‘the fullness of time,’ the time of the fulfillment of God’s promises and preparations. Mary was invited to conceive him in whom the ‘whole fullness of deity’ would dwell ‘bodily’. The divine response to her question, ‘How can this be, since I know not man?’ was given by the power of the Spirit: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you’.” (CCC, 484).
From the Daily Roman Missal: The feast of the Annunciation goes back to the fourth or fifth century. Its central focus is the Incarnation: God has become one of us. From all eternity God had decided that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity should become man. Now, as Luke 1:26-38 tells us, the decision is being realized. The God-Man embraces all humanity, indeed all creation, to bring it to God in one great act of love. Because human beings have rejected God, Jesus will accept a life of suffering and an agonizing death: “No one has greater love than this, to lay one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
Mary has an important role to play in God’s plan. From all eternity God destined her to be the mother of Jesus and closely related to him in the creation and redemption of the world. We could say that God’s decrees of creation and redemption are joined in the decree of Incarnation. Because Mary is God’s instrument in the Incarnation, she has a role to play with Jesus in creation and redemption. It is a God-given role. It is God’s grace from beginning to end. Mary becomes the eminent figure she is only by God’s grace. She is the empty space where God could act. Everything she is she owes to the Trinity.
She is the virgin-mother who fulfils Isaiah 7:14 in a way that Isaiah could not have imagined. She is united with her son in carrying out the will of God (Psalm 40:8-9; Hebrews 10:7-9; Luke 1:38).
Together with Jesus, the privileged and graced Mary is the link between heaven and earth. She is the human being who best, after Jesus, exemplifies the possibilities of human existence. She received into her lowliness the infinite love of God. She shows how an ordinary human being can reflect God in the ordinary circumstances of life. She exemplifies what the Church and every member of the Church is meant to become. She is the ultimate product of the creative and redemptive power of God. She manifests what the Incarnation is meant to accomplish for all of us.
Don’t you
find this Solemnity opportune to this post of today? Following is the continuation of our divine
longing for communion (From
Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the
Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 10).
The Nuptial Meaning of the Body
But if humankind was created in a state of communion (i.e., Original Unity) and is likewise destined for communion with God and the saints through divinization, what about now?
In the present, we experience the nuptial meaning of our bodies in the desire man and women have for each other. Ephesians 5:32 reminds us that the communion between husband and wife is a sign of Christ’s union with the whole church.
Recall what I mentioned previously about the nuptial meaning of our bodies. St. John Paul the Great asserted that God created man and woman in such a way that they would desire to make a gift of themselves to each other (2006). He created their bodies so that they could give and receive each other freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully. Through the act of lovemaking, the two become one on every level. As I note in my book Holy Sex, this oneness doesn’t last only as long as the man and woman are engaged in sex (Popcak, 2007). Intercourse creates a lasting union between the husband and wife, not just on a spiritual level, but also on a physiological level, as the neurochemicals released during lovemaking wire the partners’ brains to think of each other as if they were part of the same body. Because of this wiring, healthy interactions between husband and wife positively impact the physical well-being of both partners, and threats to the integrity of the relationship (arguments, separation, etc.) undermine the partners’ health, causing the same pain centers of the brain to light up that turn on when a person suffers physical injury (Beckes, Coan, and Hasselmo, 2013).
The desire that man and woman have for each other is a sign of the longing God has in his heart to be one with us (see Eph 5:32). God, of course, is not sexual. He doesn’t have a body. But he is nuptial in the sense that he longs for loving, creative union with us. He longs to give himself fully to us and to receive us fully in return.
In the Easter Vigil prayer known as The Exultet, we sing that “heaven is wedded to earth” on the cross when Jesus Christ gave himself freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully to humankind in the ultimate act of selfless love.
When Jesus says there is no marriage in heaven (Mk 12:25), he is not looking down his nose at marital love. Rather, he is pointing to the fact that in the Communion of the Saints we will experience the fulfillment of the nuptial union (though not a sexual union) with God and all of humankind, of which a man and woman can experience only a taste in marriage.
Of course, not all people will marry, but every human being’s body—married or not—speaks to the nuptial nature of the human person. In other words, every person was created by God to freely give of themselves to others through loving acts of generous service. When we take up this invitation, we discover how striving for communion with others by service to others enables us to discover ourselves.
Tan Books
Do you see now how providential this post of today and the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord that we celebrate today are? You and I are challenged to reflect and meditate on these mysteries of the Annunciation of the Lord and the Incarnation; Our Lady’s self-giving; The power of the Holy Spirit; The One and Three Persons in the Blessed Trinity; Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ; The Redemption of humankind. We need to be awed by God’s love, goodness and mercy towards each one of us. We need to be moved to respond to God and reciprocate His love for us by taking care of our relationship with Him in prayer during the moments of quiet we have set to talk to Him during the day.
See
you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may
you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care;
‘til He brings us together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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