This past Friday was a great feast of the Church. The 31st of May on our Kalendar means the feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Saint Elisabeth. This the Virgin Mother did immediately after the Annunciation to her by the Archangel Gabriel, that she was to be the Mother of God, which in Greek is “Theotokos.” There is a great lesson in this: for what Mary heard was the Gospel itself, proclaimed so as to be known by the message of the Angel. Gabriel said to Mary: “You will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His Name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His Kingdom there will be no end.” This is the Gospel! Jesus is He Who saves His people from their sins. And the great lesson is this: Mary did not keep the Gospel to herself, but arose and went in haste to Elisabeth. And in her very greeting to her cousin, John the Baptist in utero leaped for joy, and Elisabeth herself was filled with the Holy Spirit. So infectious is the true Gospel.
This great lesson, in other words, is about the nature of the Gospel itself. The nature of Gospel is, one, that it is of the angels (it is angelic, that is, it is a heavenly and spiritual message aimed directly to the souls of human beings); two, that it is to be proclaimed by human beings to other human beings, not to be kept to oneself, but shared, always shared; and three, that the quality of the Gospel message itself is joy. In the Visitation, we see the joy of the Gospel expressed by Mary and Elisabeth: a joy that is infectious. This is a joy that is surprising. This is a joy that elevates the soul toward God. This is a joy that draws us into thankfulness. This is a joy that throws one into prayer. Mary’s greeting elicits a wonderful and holy response from Elisabeth (part of which forms the Hail Mary prayer), to which Mary responds with her song, called by the Church her Magnificat, the first words of which are: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour.” She is joyous and her life that magnifies God, that is, it is a life of worship, for worship magnifies the power of God and the power of Jesus Christ to reveal God. These two qualities of Mary—joy and worship—are the very same two characteristics that Saint Luke uses to describe the 120 apostles after Christ’s Ascension, entering the Upper Room. Luke says, they worshiped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, continually praising and blessing God. After the Ascension, the 120 apostles became like Mary, imitating her joy in the Gospel
The last two Sundays (Pentecost and its octave day, Trinity Sunday), I preached that the life of Christians is a continual initiation into the experience of Pentecost. It is a continual initiation into the boom of the Upper Room, into the fire that the Holy Ghost lit in the hearts of the men and women who followed Jesus, into the hope given to us by Jesus Christ which is a promise of freedom in our heart from the shackles of self-centered concupiscence, because through Christ only can our hearts learn to beat with the heart of Christ Jesus as members of His Body the Holy Church. The life of a Christian, in other words, that initiation into the experience of Pentecost, this happens specifically because of the joy of the Gospel.
The Feast of the Visitation as I said makes this very clear: the Gospel elicits joy. This is also in the words of the Bride in the Song of Songs: a kiss from the Mouth of the Bridegroom, which is Christ, a kiss of joy. And we see this joy in Saint Paul’s epistle to us today: Let light shine out of darkness. The Holy Spirit shines in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, Paul teaches us. He calls this God’s “transcendent power.” And he insists while it comes from God completely, His transcendent power can be in our heart, in our soul, in our mind.
Paul says that Christians initiated into the joy of the Gospel carry in our body the death of Jesus—why?—so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. That the joy of the Gospel may be manifested in our bodies. That the Life of Christ may be in us, may fill us, may direct us, may fill us with the peace which passes all understanding—that like Blessed Mary Theotokos, our souls magnify the Lord, that our spirit rejoices in our Savior—that, in the words of blessed Jeremy Taylor, Anglican bishop of the 17th century, like Mary, our souls may be overshadowed, our spirit enlightened, that we may conceive Christ in our hearts, like Mary, and may bear Him in our mind, and may grow up the fullness of the stature of Christ, to be perfect in Christ Jesus—fed the whole journey long by the joy of the Gospel, that like Elisabeth we may be full of the Holy Spirit, and like her son John our heart might leap for joy, at the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost, lives and reigns, ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.