Hail full of grace! The Lord is with you. This greeting by the angel Gabriel to Mary has formed the first part of one of the most popular and iconic prayers that we should all be familiar with as Catholics, the Hail Mary. Since the Hail Mary is a prayer that we perhaps say on a daily basis, we join the angel Gabriel in uttering these words to our Mother Mary. And precisely because of this, this angelic greeting has lost its sting and those of us who repeat them might not get to appreciate the weight they carried when the angel Gabriel first uttered them. The Gospel account reports that when Mary heard those words, she was startled, and rightly so! The greeting was a very unusual one. As a matter of fact, it was more than a greeting. The angel was making a statement, and a very pregnant one at that. It was not an insinuation that the angel was making. It was a fact that he was stating. It was a very unusual manner of greeting someone and Mary wanted to know why.
To say that the Lord was with someone, in simple terms, was to say that someone was blessed, that the Lord had “smiled” upon him/her. Now these were words that were not uttered just like that. Neither were they to be said of anybody that happened to be passing around, just like no one could just wake up one day and make a claim to the effect that the Lord was with him/her. It was not the Lord’s normal way of conducting business to be with people, so to speak. The Lord’s “office” made it difficult for him to have fellowship with mortals. It was true there were instances in her people’s history where the Lord had visited certain individuals. However, those instances were an exception rather than the norm. Moreover, those individuals that the Lord visited were in a way superhuman. Those who walked with the Lord were no ordinary men and women. Mary was an ordinary teenager.
To say that the Lord was with a people or with a person meant a lot of things. It meant that a people had been found worthy to host the Lord. It meant that a people had been found worthy to have fellowship (communion) with the Lord. It also meant that the Lord was the peer of the individual he was with. In the case of Mary, it also meant that the Lord wanted to give her a responsibility because of her wisdom and holiness. But Mary was a mere teen, and there were more “holier” and “wiser” men and women in her village/community with whom the Lord could have communion. Something was wrong. Perhaps the angel had mistaken her for someone else.
The angel Gabriel was not mistaken. It was to Mary that he had been sent with the good news of the Lord’s visitation. But the good news was not solely Mary’s. Mary was merely a conduit for the good things the Lord had planned to do for his people. As Mary would later say in her song of praise, the greeting was intended for the entire human race (children of Abraham). As the new Eve, Mary received the angel’s greeting on behalf of her children. She received the good news on behalf of her brothers and sisters. And when she said YES, she was speaking for us for she was aware that the time was nigh for the Lord to be with his people.
The angel referred to Mary as full of grace because the Lord’s visitation is always a moment of grace. The Lord chooses those he wants to have fellowship with and then graces them for the occasion. Since the Lord’s visitation of Mary was a foreshadow of the Lord’s visitation of his people, it also follows that the goal of the Lord visiting his people was nothing other than to endow them with the graces that had been lost through humanity’s rebellion. It is this fact that makes the Christmas celebrations that we are awaiting a special one.