Fr Neil’s homily at Mass on the Annunciation, 25 March

The mystery of what we are celebrating today is so utterly profound that it is really beyond our ability to capture.

What we are asked to understand is that God, for whom nothing is impossible, might have — and could have — chosen to come any other way. But he didn’t. He chose Mary to be the Mother through whom he would enter into this world. We call Mary “the Gate of Heaven”, because it is through her that the Word was conceived and was born into the world.

God chose her, and indeed prepared her with her own Immaculate Conception, and filled her full of grace that she might be that living tabernacle where the presence of God is amongst his people.

Thus, as God in Christ has come to us through Mary, so indeed we access the gifts and graces of Christ through Mary, seeking To follow her example and know the power of her intercessions. At the end of the Gospel, in the scene of the Passion with Christ on the Cross, our Lord gives Mary to the apostle John, and the apostle John to Mary. In so doing he creates the family of the Church — seeking that she might become the Mother of all who are the children of God: that we ourselves might become her children. He did so knowing the she would seek always and everywhere to lead us to the place of reconciliation and the gifts that he himself longs to bestow on us; that we in turn might, in our devotion to her, grow so much stronger in our love for and devotion to Christ, and know all his gifts of eternal life.

The live-streamed video of Mass is available on Facebook.