(Please read the Scripture passage before reading the homily.)
March 25 is nine months before Christmas. The Church celebrates this day as the day of Christ’s conception in his mother’s womb. It is also the anniversary of Christ’s death, the anniversary of that Good Friday long ago, more about this later.
Right now, we deal with the question of explaining who Jesus Christ is. In a black-and-white definition, we can say that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Son of Mary; that as Son of God he has a divine nature and as Son of Mary he has a human nature. Nonetheless, he is only one person, who has two natures.
We search the ancient diaries, hoping that Mary kept one and wrote something like this, “Today I conceived God in my womb and gave him a human nature.” We do not, however, find such a statement nor such a document.
Instead, we tell stories to try to illustrate the magnitude of the occasion. Isaiah once spoke of signs deep as the ocean and high as the sky (Cf. Isaiah 7:10-14; 8;10). Luke describes an angel visiting Mary (1;29-38). Hebrews speaks of Christ coming into the world, not with sacrifices, but with a body. There express in different ways the magnificence of the happening. The Church Council of Nicaea in 325 analyzed these and other texts and said the Jesus Christ is a person who also has a human nature, that Jesus Christ is the God-Man, fully divine and fully human, but one person. This is what we celebrate on March 25.
What about it being also the anniversary of his death? The ancient world believed that the perfect person would die on the anniversary of his life, that he would die on the anniversary of his conception. There is an ancient belief that Jesus died on the anniversary of his conception, March 25. We do know that Passover did fall on March 25 in 31 CE. The point being made here is that the was such an ancient belief and it is reflected in the Church’s calendar. This belief says that Jesus Christ is the perfect person.
When God came into the world as the man called Jesus, he took upon himself a body. In doing so, he was saying that he had come to do God’s will. We have bodies and are in the world: how do we do God’s will?