Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
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Luke 1:26-38
The Birth of Jesus Foretold
26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”
34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. 37 For nothing is impossible with God.”
38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.” Then the angel left her.
On the Fridays of Advent, we’ve been reading and reflecting on the stories of the announcements by the angels of the events around the birth of Jesus. Today, we’re thinking about the story known to Christian tradition as “the Annunciation,” the appearance of Gabriel to Mary to tell her she would bear a child who would be the Messiah – the Savior of the world.
As I’m sitting at my keyboard in my office, I’m looking at a print of a painting of the Annunciation. It was done about a century ago by an African-American artist named Henry Ossawa Tanner. (You can see it online if you Google it.) One of the reasons I love that picture is that Mary is portrayed, not as some spiritual super-woman, but rather as an ordinary young woman listening intently to words coming out of a strange glowing presence that represents the messenger from God.
There are a couple of things about these stories of the appearances of the angels to Zechariah, Joseph and Mary that reveal some additional meaning when you hold the stories up next to one another.
For one thing, it’s interesting that the Gospel of Matthew, which the New Testament scholars say was compiled to tell the story of Jesus to Jewish readers, tells the story from the perspective of Joseph. That’s probably because to Jewish readers, the father’s role in the story (even if it was an adoptive father) would have been very important.
The Gospel of Luke, on the other hand, is understood to have been written for gentile readers. And gentiles would have cared much less about what Hebrew lineage of Jesus. Luke tells the story of Jesus’ birth largely from Mary’s perspective. And church tradition says that Luke interviewed either Mary or some other member of the family who could relate her account of the story. That makes sense, since Luke tells us things like, “Mary pondered these things in her heart.”
In the story of the Annunciation, the angel appears to Mary and greets her, telling her that she is highly favored of God. As you might expect, Mary finds this angelic appearance and greeting ‘greatly troubling.’ Actually, a better translation of the Greek word would probably be ‘alarming.’ But as the angelic messengers often do in the gospels, the angel offers words of reassurance, telling Mary not to be afraid. And then Gabriel gets on with the message he has been sent to deliver.
The angel tells Mary that she will bear a child who is to be named Jesus. Actually, it would have been Yeshua; Jesus is the Greek version of that Hebrew name, which means “God saves.” Gabriel then goes on to tell her that her child, in addition to his given name, will also be called ‘the Son of God.’ He will also take up the authority of King David, who in spite of his sins was chosen by God to lead his people.
As we said yesterday, David was revered as a military and political hero of the Hebrew people. But he was also a great spiritual leader in their history. David had established Jerusalem as the capital of his nation and brought the Ark of the Covenant there. That was understood as a critical step in establishing Jerusalem as the place from which God reigned over the earth. David was also believed to have written about a third of the psalms, (including some of the most beloved ones, like the 23rd psalm). So even a thousand years after his death, David continued to play a powerful role in the spiritual life of the covenant people.
And the prophets had foretold that the Messiah would be a descendant of David. It would be this Messiah, the angel told Mary, that she would bear.
Understandably, Mary found all this overwhelming. But the angel assured her that it would come to pass by God’s power. And he gave her a sign: Her relative Elizabeth, who had no children and was thought to be beyond childbearing age, was also pregnant.
When the angel had finished speaking, Mary responded in a way that would establish her throughout Christian history as an example of faithfulness to God’s word: She said, “May it be to me as you have said.” In spite of the risk of shame and humiliation as an engaged woman found to be pregnant, in spite of the risk of being cast out by her future husband and compelled to live a life of poverty and rejection, Mary agreed to this role in God’s work. And that one act of faith and obedience has made her the most revered woman in the history of the Christian faith – maybe in human history.
Our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions hold up Mary as a perfect and sinless woman, as a sort of ideal rather than a flesh-and-blood person. That seems like a shame to me. It seems to me that Mary becomes a more powerful figure if we understand her to be a person like all the rest of us, a sinner who needed the saving grace of God. If we relieve her of her saintly status, then Mary becomes a real person, instead of a stained-glass image. If we recognize her as a sinner like the rest of us, Mary is free to struggle with all the fears and uncertainties of life in this world. And a person who faces fears and uncertainties, and still says, “May it be to me as you have said” – that’s the kind of person who can inspire real people like us.
It seems to me that Mary deserves more respect than she usually gets from Protestant followers of Jesus – I think we sort of threw out the baby with the bathwater, as the saying goes, when it comes to Mary. The gospel account portrays Mary as an ordinary woman who made an extraordinary decision to trust and obey God at the turning point of salvation history. And for that, she deserves to be held up as one of the giants of the faith and an example for women and men alike.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for the example of Mary, and for the inspiration she has been to countless generations of Christian women. Help us to see her as the real person she was, and form within us the faith to play with the same quiet confidence the roles you call each of us to. Amen.
Have a great weekend!
Henry
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