The Annunciation

On 25 March the Church celebrates the Annunciation — the archangel Gabriel’s message to the Virgin at Nazareth, her consent, and the conception of the Word in her womb. Alone among the Marian Great Feasts it rests wholly on canonical Scripture (Luke 1), and it is the very moment of the Incarnation; its date, nine months before the Nativity, is bound by an ancient computation, and it holds a unique rank as the one feast that overrides even Great Lent.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Gospel event

The Annunciation (Greek Euangelismos, “the good tidings”) rests on the opening chapter of St Luke. The archangel Gabriel is sent to Nazareth to a virgin betrothed to Joseph, and greets her: “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee” (Luke 1:28). He announces that she will conceive and bear a son, Jesus, who “shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest,” and whose kingdom shall have no end (Luke 1:31–33). To her question, “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” Gabriel answers that the Holy Spirit shall come upon her and the power of the Highest overshadow her, so that the holy one to be born shall be called the Son of God (Luke 1:34–35). Mary’s reply is the fiat on which the world turns: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). At that consent — freely given — the Word is conceived; the Annunciation is therefore not a promise of the Incarnation but the Incarnation itself, the moment God becomes man in the Virgin’s womb (Ware, in The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, propers of the feast, pp. 439–463; and see St. the Theotokos).

The Fathers read the Annunciation through the lens of the “new Eve.” As death entered through the disobedience of a virgin, Eve, so life enters through the obedience of a virgin, Mary — the recirculatio of St Irenaeus, in which the knot of Eve’s disobedience is untied by Mary’s obedience (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.22.4; 5.19.1; trans. ANF 1; the theme recurs throughout the feast’s hymnography, The Festal Menaion, pp. 439–463). The stress on Mary’s free “yes” is essential to Orthodox theology: the Incarnation is not imposed on humanity but awaited on its consent; the Virgin answers on behalf of the whole race, and salvation begins with a human freedom cooperating with divine grace, not overridden by it. The troparion states the feast’s whole meaning: “Today is the beginning of our salvation, and the revealing of the eternal mystery: the Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin, and Gabriel proclaims the good tidings of grace” (troparion, Tone 4; The Festal Menaion, p. 460). The feast’s kontakion is the great proem Tē Hypermachō, “To you, our leader in battle” — the same it shares with the Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos, binding the feast to the Church’s supreme hymn of the Virgin (kontakion; and see The Great Marian Feasts).

The date and its computation

The date, 25 March, falls exactly nine months before the Nativity of Christ on 25 December, so that the calendar makes the conception and the birth cohere. The relation between the two dates is close and much discussed: on the “calculation” hypothesis of the origin of Christmas, the 25 March conception is the earlier fixed point, from which the 25 December birth was derived by adding nine months, rather than the reverse (Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 2nd ed., Collegeville, 1991, pp. 91–99; and see The Nativity of Christ). The choice of 25 March was reinforced by an ancient computistical tradition that associated that date with the day of creation and with the day of the Passion, gathering creation, redemption, and Incarnation onto a single date — Christ conceived on the same day of the year on which, later, he would die, and on which the world was made (Talley, Origins, pp. 91–99, on the integral-age and creation-date traditions). Whatever the exact history, the effect is a calendar of deep coherence: the Word is conceived at the spring equinox, the season of new creation, and born at the winter solstice, when the light begins to return.

A feast that overrides Lent

The Annunciation holds a rank shared by no other feast in the calendar: because 25 March almost always falls within Great Lent — and can fall as late as Bright Week — the Typikon gives it privileges that override the Lenten and even the Paschal order. The Council in Trullo (Quinisext, 692), Canon 52, restricts the full Eucharistic Liturgy on the weekdays of Great Lent to the Presanctified rite; but the Annunciation is honored with an explicit exception, so that the full Divine Liturgy is celebrated on the feast even should it fall on a Lenten weekday — indeed even on Great Friday or Great Saturday, where special rubrics apply and the feast is never transferred (Quinisext Council, Canon 52, in The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. D. Cummings; Ware, in The Festal Menaion, Introduction; Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, 1900, on the Annunciation rubrics). When the feast coincides with Pascha itself — the rare conjunction the Greeks call Kyriopascha, “the Lord’s Pascha” — the two are served together according to elaborate directions (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; The Festal Menaion, Introduction). No feast is ever transferred to make way for the Annunciation, and the Annunciation itself is never moved: it is the one fixed feast the Typikon refuses to displace, a sign of the weight the Church gives to the moment of the Incarnation. Fish is permitted on the feast regardless of the Lenten day (unless it falls in Holy Week), a relaxation of the fast in honor of the good tidings (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; and see Fasting and Feasting).

The feast is old and universal — attested across East and West from at least the fifth and sixth centuries, and among the four Marian feasts singled out at Rome by Pope Sergius I (687–701) (ODB = The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991, s.v. “Annunciation”; Liber Pontificalis, Life of Sergius I). Unlike the Nativity and Entrance of the Theotokos, its universality and antiquity match its Scriptural firmness: it needed no apocryphon to establish it.

The icon

The icon shows Gabriel arriving at speed, one foot still lifted, his right hand extended in the gesture of speech or greeting, addressing the Virgin. Mary is seated or standing, often holding a spindle of scarlet thread — a detail drawn from the Protoevangelium of James, where she is weaving the purple veil for the Temple at the moment of the message (Protoevangelium of James 10–11; Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982, on the Annunciation icon). A ray of divine light descends from above, sometimes bearing a small dove, marking the descent of the Holy Spirit and the conception; the Virgin’s inclined head and raised hand render her consent (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons; and see The Icon of the Feast). The scarlet thread is quietly Christological: the veil she weaves for the Temple prefigures the flesh she is now weaving for the Word within her.

See Also

References

  • The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The propers of the Annunciation, pp. 439–463; the Introduction on the feast’s Lenten rank.)
  • Thomas J. Talley. The Origins of the Liturgical Year. 2nd ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991. (The 25 March computation and its relation to the Nativity date.)
  • Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.22.4; 5.19.1. Trans. ANF 1. (The new-Eve theology.)
  • The Rudder (Pedalion). Trans. D. Cummings. Chicago, 1957. (Quinisext Council, Canon 52.)
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. A. Kazhdan et al. Oxford, 1991 (s.v. “Annunciation”).
  • Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982.
  • Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga. 2nd ed., 1900.
  • Liber Pontificalis, Life of Sergius I.
  • Scripture: Luke 1:26–38.