By the Rev David Brinton
“Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb”.
Those words of St Elizabeth to Our Lady in today’s gospel are probably among the most familiar to Christians in the long history of the Church, because they form part of a prayer called an ‘Ave” (the Latin for “Greetings”) or a “Hail Mary” (no not the last desperate move by the losing team in American football known as a Hail Mary pass,) a short prayer, easily committed to memory, that commemorates the Incarnation. Along with the Our Father and the doxology (Glory be to the Father…) they were for many the first prayers they learned and memorized.
Hail Mary full of the grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.
The first two phrases come from the greeting of the angel Gabriel to Mary at the Annunciation and the third from Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary at the Visitation, both from St Luke chapter one.
In this form the Hail Mary is very old, first set down in western books in the 11th c. The second part of the prayer, the petition for Mary’s intercession Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death was not set down in liturgical books until the 16th c Roman Catholic Counter Reformation.
For many on the Anglican spectrum, the Eastern Orthodox form of the full prayer is a more comfortable one:
Rejoice Mother of God and Virgin, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee! Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, for thou hast given birth to the Saviour of our souls.
Notice that the first word in the Orthodox version is Rejoice rather than Hail or Greetings. The original biblical Greek word can be translated either way.
It has been pointed out that this particular Greek word for Rejoice occurs only 4 times in Old Testament texts, each time in connection with the coming of the Messiah. So its use in the Annunciation story is hugely evocative of the identity of the child newly conceived in Mary: the long awaited fulfillment of Jewish and indeed of all human longing. The sense of the word, then, is not “O, hi Mary” but “Rejoice Mary!” It proclaims that her pregnancy is indeed the beginning of the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Hail Mary forms the basis of two great western Christian devotions, the Rosary, said with the help of beads, and the Angelus, said silently or aloud to the ringing of a bell, often three times a day, at dawn, noonday and dusk.
Bells are richly evocative, their sound alone a kind of preaching. This convent is one of a very few places in our diocese where the Angelus bell is in use with its three sets of triple rings during which can be said the versicles and responses that give shape to the story of the Incarnation, the Hail Mary repeated after each of them:
V. The angel of the Lord brought tidings unto Mary.
R. And she conceived by the Holy Ghost.
Hail Mary …
V Behold the handmaid of the Lord.
R. Be it unto me according to thy word.
Hail Mary…..
V. The Word was made Flesh.
R. And dwelt among us.
Hail Mary….
and concluding with continuous ringing as a final versicle and response and the Collect for the Feast of the Annunciation are said:
V. Pray for us O holy mother of God
R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ
We beseech thee O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts that, as we have known the incarnation of thy son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought to the glory of his resurrection, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
Whether we actually pray those words as the bell rings, or use the moment for some other form of preparation, it is good to remember the origins of this devotion in the texts associated with this last Sunday of Advent, right on the cusp of Christmas.
The Hail Mary, or maybe even better Rejoice Mary, obviously reminds us of, and honours Mary the mother of Jesus, the first Christian, the mother of all believers, and therefore the mother of the Church. It also helps us to focus on what we are about to celebrate in the days ahead and keeps us connected all year round to the core of the Christian mystery which begins with the Incarnation, the enfleshment of God, in which the creative mystery behind the universe becomes one with us in the human life, the human body of Jesus, born of Mary. It is this human-divine solidarity, this human -divine marriage, this saving reality that causes the life in Elizabeth to leap at meeting the life in Mary. It is what gives rise to our liturgical worship. It is what lies behind our belief that in the eucharist, under the appearance of ordinary bread and wine, we receive the divine life itself.
And it is what lies behind our conviction about the absolute value of every human life, the impetus to insist on and strive for the dignity of every human being. The glory of God is humanity fully alive, as the ancient theologian said, summing up the doctrine of the Incarnation and its effects.
And Mary’s role? Mary the mother of the Advent, the mother of us all? To say yes to this, fully and freely. To say yes to bearing God to the world in her own life. In this sense each of us is called to be like her, to experience a conception within ourselves, to allow God in Jesus to grow in us until he becomes the very air we breathe, and to share him with the world in which live. And that sharing of Jesus with the world, that evangelism, which is the ministry of each of us in the unique way to which each of us is called, is to be like Mary’s sharing of Jesus with Elizabeth in today’s gospel.
As Advent draws to a close again this year, as we greet Our Lady with the words of Gabriel and Elizabeth: Ave/ Greetings/ Hail/ Rejoice Mary full of grace! The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus, let us pray that God will help us to Rejoice with her at the gift that has been conceived in us, and that we are once again this year called to give birth to, for the sake of others.
