The Annunciation is the announcement by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary of the future birth according to the flesh of Jesus Christ.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit!

Today is the joy of the Annunciation; today heaven is joined to earth; today the ancient curse vanishes, the crime of Adam is blotted out, and sorrow is turned to joy. Today is the day when God became man, so that man might become a god. Today the heavens have broken through the blockade erected by man’s sin, through the humble assent of the Virgin and her words of creation: “Be it unto me according to thy word” (Lk. 1:38).

God became man that man might ascend to the heights of heaven. God took on weak, sinful, corruptible human nature in order to endow it with sinlessness, incorruption, and purity. God takes flesh from the Most Pure Virgin, that He might teach us also divine purity. And today is the day of the Gospel, the day of the Good News which we hear concerning the hope for the sake of which we live. It is the hope of deification, because you and I are called to become gods by grace.

The first man fell because he hoped for deification, but a godless deification, and to this day many desire to achieve deification without God. They want to decide for themselves how to live and how to act; they decide for themselves what is good or bad for them, without looking to God. And as a result, people fall into misfortunes and disasters. Nor could it be otherwise: a person who rejects the good news of salvation inevitably hears the evil news of his own demise. All this is inevitable and natural in the fallen world into which original sin has plunged us. But today this black world is penetrated by the celestial light of paradise—the Annunciation. Today the Lily of Purity, the Most Pure Mother of God, blooms in her beauty in the corruptible world and gives off the fragrance of incorruption for us. Today we receive the possibility of authentic—not counterfeit—deification. We are indeed called to become gods. As Basil the Great replied, when it was proposed that he worship creation: “I who am called to become a god cannot worship a creation.”

We must become gods by grace. What does this mean? What is the chief hope of our calling, of which Scripture and the holy fathers of the Church speak, to which all true Christians have always aspired? The question is not one of escaping hell and not being fried on skillets. Our task is to become gods! God possesses unthinkable and astounding properties. God is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving, merciful, meek, and humble. God is an endless fullness of all good things, and man must become a partaker in this infinite fullness. Man must unite with God so that he becomes a participant in eternal life, so that within him the unoriginate life of God might begin to flow.

As the Lord said, “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive)” (Jn. 7:38–39).

This occurred because God became man, and the divine life became accessible to men. How could it be possible to attempt to describe the divine reality if God had not become man? It could not. How could we be able to taste of the divine power if we had not partaken of it? And would we have been able to partake of the divine power if it had come to glory without being concealed in human flesh? We would simply have been unable to endure this immeasurable effulgence, which the Cherubim fear and from which the Seraphim hide their faces. We ourselves could not have endured this flame; we would have been consumed. When Moses beheld God in the Burning Bush, he fell upon his face, fearing to gaze upon Him. The divine power and glory are so exalted that we would be blinded and deafened by the unimaginable glory of God. For God is invisible specifically because He is too overwhelmingly bright for our eyes, which are too weak to perceive such unimaginable brilliance. We cannot even look at the sun for long; how then can we look upon Him Who is the sun’s Creator, Who is a light more powerful than that of the sun?

Through the divine incarnation, by virtue of the fact that God became man, taking on human nature from the Most Pure Virgin Mary, you and I are able to behold God, and we are able to partake of the divine life, through the intermediacy of the flesh of Christ the Savior, which He took on today from the most pure blood of the blessed Lady Theotokos. And this is truly the mystery of mysteries: it is a marvel greater than the creation of the world. It is the miracle of miracles, and as Saint John of Damascus said, “The name ‘Theotokos’ is the only new name under the sun.”

The Ecclesiast says, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclus. 1:9).

But the event of the divine incarnation, when God broke through into history, when God became man while still remaining God, is inimitable. This event had never occurred before, and it will never be repeated again. It is an unimaginable alteration of all things, as today we sang in the sticheron: “The Father shows His good pleasure from on high, and the Holy Spirit descends, cleansing the Virgin. The Son of God becomes the Son of Man, and the alteration of human nature is accomplished by the common council of the Trinity.” The council of the Holy Trinity decided to change and remake human nature, that it might be made strong instead of weak, incorruptible instead of corruptible, immortal instead of mortal, wise instead of foolish, and so that the nature which had lived by egoism might begin to live by love for God.

And also so that man might become an exact self-portrait of God, as he was originally intended to be. It was for this reason that the original image of the Father, the eternal imprint of His essence—the Son of God—comes to earth, and in Himself restores the prototype which He Himself created with His own hands in the beginning. And this is the day when together we rejoice and exult on the Annunciation, the true feast of our deliverance, when we rejoice that at last the unimaginable has come to pass. He has come—not as an ambassador from outer space or from the angelic world, but as the Creator of all worlds Himself, the Lord of the universe, and He has become one of us. When we contemplate and rejoice in this unimaginable mystery, we must ourselves be raised up, as the Church sings: “Christ has come down from the heavens that we might be raised up to heaven.” Imitate God, and cleanse yourselves in accordance with the Prototype Who came to renew us. Let the purity of the Queen of Heaven, the Divine Lily, blossom in our hearts also; let divine love and beauty, humble-mindedness, and the quiet, unobtrusive doing of God’s will lay open our hearts to the abundant streams of the Holy Spirit; let them wash over us, cleanse us, and raise us up higher than all the heavens, as they raised up our resplendent Queen, the Most Blessed Mary, the Queen of Heaven!

May the Omnipotent Lord help us, and may the Lord keep you all!