The Depths of Sorrow and the Heights of Joy - Sermon for the Feast of the Annunciation (2025)

Our feast today is called Annunciation, in Greek εὐαγγελισμός. It means no ordinary proclamation but the preaching of good news, glad tidings, of the gospel. Accordingly, the Angel Gabriel begins his salutation to the Virgin with the greeting, “Rejoice!” And as we heard in the Synaxarion reading last night, this feast is above all else a feast of joy: “Rejoice, thou through whom joy will shine forth! Rejoice, thou through whom the curse will cease!” The Mother of God herself is called the “joyous one” throughout the hymns of the Church.

It may strike us as a bit odd, then, that this most joyous occasion almost always falls during the penitential season of Great Lent. If we participate in the service on a merely superficial level, it can feel schizophrenic to sing festal hymns with one breath, and with the next to confess our sins and make prostrations. But these features of the feast are no coincidence, but rather the work of God’s Providence. In His wisdom, He is teaching us that spiritual joy is inextricably linked with sorrow and mourning. It is not going too far to say that our capacity to feel true joy, pure joy, incorruptible joy, is exactly commensurate with our capacity to suffer.

If we know our sinful, fallen nature well enough, it should not be too difficult to understand why. In our fallen state, alienated from God, we have an innate tendency towards pride and self-love, from which spring all the other passions. Even worse, in our world today, we are informed from all sides that it is precisely in the uninterrupted indulgence of our selfish impulses that we are to seek our happiness. We are even entitled to this happiness. We have a right to it. The latest sign at Wendy’s advertising their Thin Mint Frosty assures us, “You earned this.”

Of course, such pleasure are fleeting and ultimately leave our hearts restless and yearning for more. As Christians we know that what our heart truly longs for is the love of God; and we ought to know, too, that the path God offers us to make this love our own is the path of the Cross. It is the exact opposite of what the world says. Christ tells us, “Deny yourself and your petty preferences, take up your Cross and embrace hardship and suffering, follow Me to Golgotha and keep your heart nailed to the Cross every moment of your life—and then you will know firsthand the great mystery of God’s love, and will experience imperishable joy that no man can take from you.”

Other than our Savior, we see this truth exemplified most fully in the person of the Blessed Virgin. The Fathers tell us that the joy she experienced at the moment of Christ’s conception in her womb is utterly beyond our comprehension. The Tenderness Icon that depicts this holy moment of the Mother of God’s sacrificial self-offering has the refrain, “Rejoice, O Bride Unwedded!” inscribed around the halo. But we know that at that moment, the Theotokos also embraced all of the difficulties, heartaches, and sufferings that her unique vocation entailed.

She herself could scarcely believe the Archangel’s miraculous message; who else would believe her when her pregnancy began to show. The consequences of an unlawful union could have been grave indeed, as the woman taken in adultery mentioned in St. John’s Gospel shows us (John 8). This difficulty was only the first of many. St. Symeon predicted that a sword would pierce her soul; and it did many times in the course of the Savior’s life. She was pierced when the Holy Family had to flee for their lives into Egypt. She was pierced when she and Joseph could not find Jesus on their return from Jerusalem, and sought Him sorrowing for three days. She was pierced when men mocked and rejected her Son and His preaching throughout the course of His earthly ministry. But she was pierced most of all during His Passion and Crucifixion, as He took upon Himself the sins of the whole world. The Fathers tell us that the Virgin was spared the pangs of childbirth because our Lord was conceived in purity; but the physical pain of childbirth was as nothing compared to the sufferings of soul that the Virgin Mary felt as she gazed upon her precious Son, battered and bloodied, hanging from the Cross. St. Silouan says that she only remained alive because “the Lord’s might sustained her.”[1]

The very thing that made the Virgin worthy of hearing the Archangel’s salutation is also the reason that she suffered so greatly—her love for the Lord. Joy and sorrow: two apparent opposites, and yet love contains them both. This is the teaching of St. Silouan:

When the soul abides in the love of God—how good and gracious and festive all things are! But even with God’s love, sorrows continue and the great the love, the greater the sorrow. Never by a single thought did the Mother of God sin, nor did she ever lose grace, yet vast were her sorrows; when she stood at the foot of the Cross her grief was as boundless as the ocean and her soul knew torment incomparably worse than Adam’s when he was driven from paradise, in that the measure of her love was beyond compare greater than the love which Adam felt when he was in paradise … Just as the love of the Mother of God is boundless and passes our understanding, so is her grief boundless and beyond our understanding.[2]

If the most pure, immaculate and sinless Virgin was no stranger to sorrows but indeed suffered in ways unimaginable to us, how can we expect anything other than sorrows in this life, inasmuch as we are sinful and in need of purification? Suffering is necessary and beneficial, as long as we endure it patiently and humbly. When God sends us sorrows, He is carving our room in our hearts, to make them capacious enough for His love. When He lays Crosses upon us, He is harrowing the stony ground of our hearts so that they can bring forth abundant joy—joy that is pure and knows no trace of vanity, according to the Proverb, If a man’s heart is sensitive, his soul is sorrowful, but when he rejoices, he has no fellowship with pride (Prov. 14:10 LXX).

To our stony and insensitive hearts, the pain of sorrow and suffering is deeply repugnant, as Christ says, No man having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better (Lk. 5:39). But if we drink the bitter cup down to the dregs, then we will find it opens our hearts to joy that is not of this world. However, it requires a great deal of faith on our part to accept that the Crosses and sorrows we have to bear are truly sent by God’s love for our good, so that we might abide in the spiritual joy we celebrate today. Sometimes it may seem that our Crosses are so neatly fine-tuned to target our deepest attachments, designed to inflict the maximum and most exquisite inner pain, that we think God must truly relish our suffering. This is a lie of the devil, and one that our faint hearts, so lacking in love, are prone to believe. Here too the Mother of God is our example in the simplicity of her faith. For once she confirmed the trustworthiness of the angelic messenger, she did not stagger at the impossibility of what she was told no at the burdens and sufferings her vocation inevitably entailed, but simply and succinctly said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word (Lk. 1:38).

If it were us, we would balk at the non-sensical nature of what was being asked of us, or we would shirk the hardships and be filled with an unholy elation at being specially chosen by God. Tradition tells us that the Virgin was so humble-minded that she prayed to be worthy simply of being a handmaid to the Virgin prophesied by Isaiah (Is. 7:14). She could have never imagined that she was the one chosen for such a task. She remained in that humble-mindedness not just at the Lord’s conception, but throughout the whole time of her pregnancy and the Lord’s earthly life.

If we too wish to receive the word of God for our own lives, we need to imitate the Virgin’s faith and humility. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts (Is. 55:8-9). God’s purpose for our lives may be very different from our own purposes. To our limited, earthbound minds, God’s purpose may seem ludicrous, or it may be at odds with long-cherished and well thought-out goals and aspirations. Though God means it to us for good, God may point us towards His purpose through something that has an outwardly tragic or sorrowful nature. When God sends us these indications of His will, we too must answer with the Virgin’s words, “Be it unto me according to Thy word.” Otherwise, we will fall short of God’s ultimate purpose—our sanctification and deification—and instead we will live shallow, self-centered lives, full of cheap comforts but bereft of true joy.

I should also mention that today is the 100th anniversary of the repose of the holy Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow. As with everything in God’s power, this too is no mere coincidence. The holy Patriarch exemplified all of the attributes of the Mother of God in his own way. He was a great shepherd, a father to the Russian people at one of the most difficult moment in their history. Like the Mother of God, he had great love for the people, and he held their suffering in his own heart. Like the Mother of God, he was not inwardly exalted by his high station, but always remained accessible and approachable by his clergy and all the people. Like the Mother of God, he knew how to comfort and console the Christian people. He carried our a humanly impossible providential task, always striving to be led by the grace of the Spirit. He had to endure all manner of slander from those that rejected God. And just like the Holy Virgin, he drank his cup of sufferings to the full.

St. Tikhon’s fatherly tenderness, his shepherd’s heart, is evident even in the grainy old photographs of him that survive. It is said that outwardly, he was a rather unassuming man, gentle-hearted and no of an austere countenance. This caused his adversaries to underestimate his spiritual depths. On one hand, the renovationist so-called “Metropolitan” Vvedensky said of him that he is “a weak-willed, soft-hearted character who never wielded any authority… He was never known to be an outstanding orator… In general he is just a random individual.” On the other hand, his hard-liner opponent, the strict ascetic Bishop Theodore of the Danilov Monastery complained that, “He’s always laughing and petting the cat.”[3]

Much like the New Hieromartyr Hilarion Troitsky, St. Tikhon’s levity could bring light to even the darkest situations. When he was being kept under house arrest at the Donskoy Monastery, and being haled to the Lubyanka prison regularly for brutal interrogation and psychological torture, the saint eventually posted a sign over his door that read, “Not available for questions concerning counter-revolution.” One day after returning late from yet another round of interrogation, his cell attendant asked him eagerly, “How was it?”

“They interrogated me for an awfully long time.”

“And what will happen to you?”

“They promised to chop off my head,” he said wearily but with a smile in his eyes.[4]

This capacity to sustain good spirits even in the midst of great difficulties and sorrows sprang from the same source in St. Tikhon as it did in the Mother of God—namely, love for God and love for His people. This is precisely what St. Tikhon prayed for at his patriarchal enthronement, and how he understood his own ministry. “Warm my heart with love for the children of God’s Church and enlarge it, that they might be easily contained in me. For archpastoral service is first of all a service of love. When a sheep is lost, the archpastor takes it upon his shoulders.”[5] This is truly how he lived his service too. Once, there was a poor village woman who had come to his office from the countryside and spent all day weeping outside his door, not eating or drinking, because there was a canonical issue with her daughter’s marriage that she felt only the Patriarch could resolve. The Patriarch’s assistant thought he was too busy with affairs of national importance to be bothered with one private individual’s request. Nevertheless, when he found out about her, he saw her and consoled her and put her issue to rest.[6]

So we see in the life and witness of the saintly Patriarch the very same lesson that we are taught by the present feast, on which he departed to the Lord one-hundred years ago: The lesson that love, true love, spiritual love, divine love, and it alone, can comprehend both the depths of sorrow and the heights of joy. Let us then rejoice on this holy day, and endure with renewed vigor and with a cheerful heart, all of the sorrows and difficulties that await us on our God-ordained path into the unending bliss of His kingdom. Amen.