Imagine the moment when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary and announced that God wanted her to be the mother of His Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. St. Bernard, the 12th Century monk and Doctor of the Church imagined that moment in a homily where he addressed Mary at the moment of the Annunciation:
You have heard, O Virgin, that you will conceive and bear a son; you have heard that it will not be by man but by the Holy Spirit. The angel awaits an answer; it is time for him to return to God who sent him. We too are waiting, O Lady, for your word of compassion; the sentence of condemnation weighs heavily upon us. … Answer quickly, O Virgin. Reply in haste to the angel, or rather through the angel to the Lord. Answer with a word, receive the Word of God. Speak your own word, conceive the divine Word. Breathe a passing word, embrace the eternal Word.
The future of the human race hung in a balance. If Mary had said “No,” the human race would have been forever lost, with the gates of heaven barred against us. But Mary responded, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” St. Augustine said that Mary first received the Word into her Immaculate Heart and then the Word became flesh in her womb. Cell by cell the body of Jesus developed in her womb. Within three weeks His first physical organ—the heart—appeared and began to beat right under Mary’s heart. Nine months later, the Son of God who took flesh, joining humanity and divinity together, was born homeless in Bethlehem. And it all became possible because of one woman’s “Yes” to God’s plan for her and humanity.
The Solemnity of the Annunciation is a very Eucharistic feast. Because Jesus took flesh in Mary’s womb, He was able to offer His flesh on the Cross for the salvation of humanity and to give to believers His flesh in Holy Communion. Now Jesus continues to take flesh in the bodies of believers.
Pope St. John Paul II, in his last encyclical letter “Ecclesia de Eucharistia,” put it this way:
At the Annunciation Mary conceived the Son of God in the physical reality of his body and blood, thus anticipating within herself what to some degree happens sacramentally in every believer who receives, under the signs of bread and wine, the Lord’s body and blood. As a result, there is a profound analogy between the Fiat which Mary said in reply to the angel, and the Amen which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord.
Truly, through Mary, we are the Body of Christ. We would be lost without her and her obedience to God’s will. That’s why we can never stop thanking her and thanking God who, as she proclaimed in her Magnificat, “has done great things.”