Today is the fountainhead of our salvation / and the manifestation of the mystery which was from eternity / The Son of God becometh the Virgin’s Son, / and Gabriel proclaims the good tidings of grace; / wherefore, we also cry to the Theotokos with him: / Rejoice, thou who art full of grace, // the Lord is with thee!

Today is the beginning. And the beginning of our salvation is in the word of the Mother of God, which She said to the Archangel Gabriel in response to all that he told Her from God.

We read in the Gospel that in the sixth month after St. John the Baptist was conceived in the womb, Archangel Gabriel was sent from God to the city of Galilee, called Nazareth, to the Virgin, betrothed to her husband, named Joseph, from the house of David; The name of the Virgin is Mary.

For our salvation to be completed and God become a Man, it was necessary not only the action of the Holy Spirit, but also the meekness and consent of the One who was determined to become His Mother.

The Archangel greets Her with great respect: Rejoice, highly favored, full of grace, The Lord is with you! Blessed art thou among women.

She, seeing him, was embarrassed by his words and wondered what kind of greeting it would be.

In the service of the feast, it is said that Mary feared seduction, remembering the fall of Eve. And this embarrassment shows Her deepest humility, the consciousness of one’s insignificance and the unwillingness to be significant neither in front of others nor, again, in one’s own eyes.

For the Mother of God, all significance was in God… Then she would say: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit is rejoiced in God, my Savior, that he looked upon the humility of his servant, for from now on all generations will greet me. Not about Himself She rejoices, but about God — not that all generations will appease her, but that She served His great work.

In the meantime, the Angel says to her: Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found grace with God; and behold, you shall conceive in the womb, and bear a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus. He will be great and be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give Him the throne of David his Father; and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will have no end.

And we remember that even in the Jerusalem temple, She took a vow to keep her virginity all her life. And so Mary asks, — no longer from distrust, but to understand: how will it be when I do not know my husband? She worried — should she break the vow given to God? And the angel answered her: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore, the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God. Here is Elizabeth, your relative, who is called childless, and she conceived a son in her old age, and she is already six months, because no word shall be impossible with God.

And she agrees. The evangelist Luke describes the beginning of our salvation in very simple words: And Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word.

The beginning of our destruction, our falling away from God, was that Adam and Eve did not obey God. The beginning of salvation is in obedience of the Mother to God. And what She chose, we know from further events, and according to Tradition, the Archangel Gabriel told Her about it then, immediately, on the day of the Annunciation.

Then there was Great Friday, when the Mother of God stood near the Cross, on which Her Divine Son was crucified for the sins of the whole world. Then, after this, there was His burial, — Joseph of Arimathea with Nicodemus rolled a stone to the opening of the coffin. And before that was His long journey to this, during which the words spoken to the Mother of God by the righteous Simeon the God-bearer were fulfilled repeatedly: And to You Yourselves the weapon will pass the soul. Thus our salvation was accomplished, this is what she served, this is to what she said Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.

But the salvation will not touch our life until these words are said only by the Mother of God, without us. It is promised to all of us, and it is told to all of us that the path to it is the way of the cross, that through many sorrows we must enter into it. It is also said to us that Christ is with us all the days until the end of time, if only we are with Him, if we seek the Kingdom of Heaven, and not the satisfaction of our self. Let us say this to the Lord: “Behold, your servants, let it be according to your word”.

Our salvation takes place where our will meets the will of God and follows it. Rejoice, says the Archangel to the Mother of God, Lord is with You. Her joy is given today to everyone who follows Christ. Amen.