To Be Joyful In The Lord
🌅 The Joyful Mysteries
The Incarnation and Hidden Life of Christ
Prayed on Mondays and Saturdays, and Sundays of Advent
The Joyful Mysteries are part of the original fifteen mysteries given, by tradition, from the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Dominic. They follow the Incarnation of the Word made flesh: the announcement, the carrying, the birth, and the hidden years of the God who has truly entered His creation. Read together they are a theophany, in the Eastern sense of that word, a sequence of moments in which God is made known. He is made known to Mary by an angel, to Elizabeth by the leaping of the child in her womb, to the shepherds by the angelic host and to the Magi by the scholars reading the prophecies, to Simeon and Anna in the Temple, and at last to the doctors of the Law by a boy who is their Lord.
That emphasis on real flesh and real manifestation is not incidental; it is a weapon. St. Dominic preached these mysteries against the Cathars, who had simply recycled the old Gnostic and Manichean contempt for the material world, denying that God could take a true body at all. The Joyful Mysteries answer that error scene by scene: the Word is really conceived, really carried through the hills of Judea, really born, really presented in the Temple, really found teaching in the flesh. To pray them is to confess the Incarnation the heretics denied.
Read the diagram at left in clockwise order.
Each mystery is described briefly below to give you a sense of what to meditate on before we take up the scriptural teaching in depth.
The Archangel Gabriel comes to Mary and tells her of God's plan to bring the Messiah to His people through her, that she will give birth to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. God is first made known to the one who will carry Him.
Mary travels through the hills of Judea while pregnant with Christ, echoing the Ark of the Covenant's journey through the same hills to King David, who worshipped before it. Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant, and her Ark is Jesus Christ, made known to Elizabeth by the leaping of the child in her womb.
Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, is born as the newborn King and worshipped as such. Here the newborn is made known in two modes at once: the angelic host proclaims Him to the shepherds in the field, while Herod's scholars read Him out of the Messianic prophecies for the Magi. The learned and the lowly are drawn to the one manger.
The Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph present Jesus in the Temple according to the Mosaic Law, where He is made known to Simeon and Anna. Here too we receive the prophecy of Simeon, which is counted among the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The last we read of Christ in His childhood, and a glimpse of His wisdom before the doctors and lawyers in the Temple, to whom He is made known as more than a boy. These are not the physician and the attorney we picture today; they are teachers who expound doctrine, as the Doctors of the Church do, and interpreters of religious law, much like the canon lawyers who interpret sacred teaching to guide the faithful.
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