The "fear not" of the angel gave me peace. The heartbeat, however, continued and increased when he said to me: "You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus." Jesus means Savior: a name that comes from God. My intuition had not been wrong: it is an immense thing!
When the desire appeared in me to offer God the renunciation of motherhood, I did so by asking God to hasten the coming of the Messiah, which our people needed so much, by renouncing what every girl in Israel desired: to be his mother. I offered her, for that wait, the public humiliation of barrenness. Everyone would have said: God does not love her. No one would have been able to know because no one would have been able to understand. But God inspired me and asked me to keep this resolution only for myself and then share it only with Joseph.
"He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High." Extraordinary words, but what the angel said next struck me even more: "The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and his kingdom will have no end." That "forever." that his reign that "there will be no end" suggested to me a whole new dimension of what was being revealed to me. "Joseph is of the house of David," I thought, "so is he within this promise?".
Those big words told me that there was so much more that eluded me. What I heard revealed to me a personal love and choice of God over me that overwhelmed me. I had no intention of refusing; I just didn't understand how all this could be done. If God had asked me, I was ready to leave Joseph, even if it would have cost me blood and I would not have known how to do it. Or did Joseph have to participate in all this? But how? What did the Lord want to tell me? I pondered and could not understand. I thought I was before God's messenger: I could ask him what God's plans were. It was not easy.
Those sudden, intimate and brief words came to me as an extreme synthesis of what was going on in my heart: "In what way shall this be done, for I know not a man?". The angel only partly cleared up the mystery. But he gave me absolute confidence. I reflected afterwards that I would have to learn the next steps to take, one at a time. If he had explained everything to me at that moment, it would have been too much, I would not have been able to take it on. He said to me: "The Holy Spirit will descend upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, he who shall be born Holy shall be called the Son of God.". I was understanding: it was something absolutely unthinkable and infinitely new. God was making all things new. I felt the immensity of God's love and his nearness.
The homily on the readings of the Immaculate Conception
The priest Luis Herrera Campo offers its nanomiliaa small one-minute reflection for these readings.
