Author Keith Lowery recounts the events surrounding a health scare that he had several years ago. After his admission to the ER, he received from his doctor a grim prognosis. He had six months, probably far fewer.
Later that night, Keith called his boss, named Gary. Gary answered the phone groggily. “Hi, Gary?” “Hello, who is this?” “Hey, Gary, sorry to call you at such a late hour, but I need to tell you I won’t be coming in to work tomorrow. In fact, there’s no easy way of telling you this, but I may not be coming in ever again. My doctor told me I don’t have long to live.”
Keith lived to tell about it. Few experiences, as you no doubt will agree, shake us more profoundly than a health scare. But life throws us curveballs. Sometimes all of our plans—all of them—go up in smoke. But there are life-lessons to be learned from such experiences. After nearly dying, Keith found that he’s far more sensitive to how people react to uninvited, whipsaw changes in their plans.
How we react to these changes reveals a lot about us, about how we see God, about how we see the nature of our lives in God’s presence, or as ancient Israel put it, before God’s face.
Which brings us to a woman named Mary—a girl really. There is nothing that distinguishes her from the rest of the girls in her village of Nazareth. There is nothing that makes her stand out. She is an ordinary girl with ordinary hopes and dreams—to find a good man and to raise a family together with him.
This is about as much as we can say about her. We don’t really know about Mary’s origins. The Scriptures are silent. We may infer that she doesn’t come from a wealthy, prominent family. She’s not from the priestly caste. She’s not a student in the school of the prophetesses. She’s just a girl from Nazareth, now engaged to a good man named Joseph.
But then her life is upended. God sends an angel to her little village. His name is Gabriel, which, in the original language, means the “power of God.” Of all people in Nazareth, of all people in Israel, Gabriel comes to Mary. But, as Calvin writes, God prefers to exhibit his power in the small things. Nothing grand to attract the eyes of men, but rather the insignificant, even contemptible in their eyes.
“Greetings, favored one” (Luke 1:28). Already we see something here essential to the Christmas message. It is God who sends; it is God who takes the initiative. This places Mary in the posture to receive. It’s her part to be open and hospitable to the encounter and what it brings.
Parenthetically, Christianity, like Judaism, is classified by religion scholars as an historical faith. That is, it is not based on a timeless philosophy of life, or on the mystical visions of some enlightened guru, ancient or modern. Rather, it’s based on an encounter with the God who acts in human history.
For example, Moses encountered God in the burning bush, the God who announced that he’d heard the cries of his people and was coming to liberate them from their bondage to their Egyptian slave masters.
So here Mary encounters the messenger of God, who announces that God is entering into human history, in a decisive way, to liberate, to save, and to re-establish his people.
There is more to be seen here. The angel says, “The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). These words have a profound significance that we don’t want to miss. Throughout the Bible, they present a challenge. They are spoken to Isaac, Joshua, Gideon, and David among others.
Remember how they are put to Gideon? “The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, “The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior” (Judges 6:12).
When these words are spoken, they constitute an invitation. Someone is invited to step out from the ordinary and familiar into the new and unknown, into a role that is fraught with risks and possibilities.
Moses, at the burning bush, is told that the Lord will be with him as he sets out from his “comfortable obscurity in order to lead God’s people out of slavery.”
Mary is told the Lord is with her as she’s about to assume her unique role in the plan of salvation,” the unexpected adventure on which she’s about to set out (Mark A. Villano).
The invitation always evokes feelings of fear and uncertainty. That’s totally understandable. We humans resist the unknown, the unfamiliar. We have a hard time adjusting to change. That is why we cling to our comfortable habits and routines, even when they longer serve us.
No wonder, then, that Mary is troubled or perplexed by the greeting as she pondered what it meant. If she’s familiar with the stories of the scriptures of her people—and no doubt she was–she has a pretty good idea of what it meant. The angel sees her need for reassurance. “Do not fear Mary, for you have found favor with God” (Luke 1:30).
We may ask: why this woman? Why is she favored by God? The simple answer is that it pleases God to favor her. This “good pleasure” is reflected in the word “favored one.”
That is more apparent in the original language, where we see the word “grace” in Gabriel’s greeting. Here Gabriel repeats this word: “you have found grace with God” (Lk. 1:30).
God’s salvation from beginning to end is grace. Our salvation does not depend on what we do or make or build; it depends on God’s grace. This is the good news, which see in perfect clarity during Christmas.
Did not David have to learn this lesson? In our Old Testament lesson, we heard that David wanted to “build” a house for God, but then Nathan told David what God was going to build for him. Not David—he is not the active subject, but God.
This is what’s at issue today. God is about to fulfill this promise to David. Now we understand why Luke saw fit to include the detail that Joseph is of the house of David. God is faithful to all his promises. Mary, Joseph’s wife, will conceive and bear a son, whose name will be Jesus.
Could the one borne by Mary be the Messiah? Could this one be the fulfillment of all the hopes of Israel, after all this time?
The people have not had a king in the line of David since Zedekiah, whose reign ended tragically more than 600 years earlier, when the hapless king was captured by the Babylonian invaders, who bound him and gouged out his eyes. Was God now, after all this time, going to re-establish the Davidic dynasty?
Gabriel continues: “He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:32, 33).
Mary correctly assesses the implausibility of the angel’s pronouncement, especially her role in it.
Mary’s objection is typical of those whom God has singled out before her. “Who am I, that I should go to Pharoah and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Moses asks (Exodus 3:11). “Please, my Lord,” Gideon pleaded, “how can I save Israel? Indeed, my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my father’s house” (Judges 6:15). “Ah Lord God, I do not know how to speak. I am only a boy,” Jeremiah protested (Jer. 1:6). “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Mary objects (Luke 1:34).
The angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
Not that this cleared up her confusion. But God is patient. He supports his chosen instruments by giving them a sign. In Mary’s case, it is the pregnancy of her cousin Elizabeth. “Do you know your cousin, Elizabeth, the old barren woman? She is now in her sixth month. For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:36,37).
What is impossible with man is possible with God. This forever enshrines a truth about salvation. We are helpless to save ourselves. Jesus states this explicitly when his own disciples ask him: “Who can be saved?” Jesus replied: “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are impossible” (Matt. 19:25-26). This is a thread that runs continuously throughout the Bible.
All this must have been totally overwhelming to the young Mary. Talk about life throwing us a curveball! However Mary thought her life was going to turn out before the angel appeared to her with this earth-shattering news, it was certainly not going to be that anymore.
Consider now what awaits her. This unforeseen turn of events put her in the unenviable position of having to convince her friends and family that, after hundreds of years of silence, God inexplicably singled her out.
And if that’s not enough, she has also to convince them that this shocking teenage pregnancy was a result of the holy and the miraculous that God did in her.
All this makes Mary’s response all the more remarkable. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
Let us consider her words for a moment. Her willing acceptance, “let it be with me according to your word” is premised on her identity. (“I am the servant of the Lord.”) “Here am I” is a classic formula in the language of the Old Testament. It says in effect, “I am totally at your disposal, Lord. Speak to me and I will obey. Send me and I will go.”
Her calm reaction to the unexpected, whipsaw change can only be explained by her awareness of the nature of her life—that she lives before the face of God, and that that in turn means that she is surrendered to the will of God.
Her reaction was informed by her conviction that her life, and even her body, was the possession of the Lord. She was prepared to accept her unique role in God’s plan, because she understood that the most important thing about her is not that she was meant to be someone’s wife, but that she is a servant of the Lord (Chelsea Harmon). She realized that her life is caught up in God’s plan, and not that God is caught up in hers.
In this way, Mary models for us the Christian’s response to God. And this makes sense, because she is the first human to literally welcome Christ and invite him to make his home within her (Chelsea Harmon). She is an open vessel, ready to receive from God the gift of his Son that he wants to give us.
Can we say the same about ourselves? God addresses to us a word of grace. The is the Christmas message. “Greetings, favored one” is an address to each one of us, because Jesus reveals us as those on whom God’s favor rests, just as the angels sung (Luke 2:14). This grace addressed to us is the word of God, the word about Jesus, the word that is proclaimed to us this Christmas. There is nothing that we can make, do, or build to receive it. But we do have to be prepared for the change that it will bring.
Perhaps this is the real challenge that the Christmas message poses to us. Perhaps the hesitation people have in receiving it does not primarily have to do with their misgivings about an unlikely story about an angel, a pregnant virgin, and a Son of God whose kingdom shall never end. Perhaps on a deeper level it has to do instead with their fear of change, a fear that we all have as human beings.
But there’s no getting around it. As author Lauren Winner writes: “To live the life of faith we must let God interrupt us.” And those interruptions create uncertainty and fear, as we have already mentioned. Accepting this message revolutionizes one’s life. No longer will one see one’s self and one’s life before the face of God in the same way. Things will never be the same again.
But God also tells us “do not fear.” Assured that God will be with us, we can receive this word with humility, the word that has been implanted in us, which can save us (James 1:21).
The verse conjures up in our minds the image of conception and pregnancy. In this light, another dimension of Mary as a model to us, to all Christians, appears.
Following Mary’s example, we too ought to receive the word implanted in us with humility. And we too ought patiently to wait for God to do his work in us, a work of sheer grace, a work that, when it is time for it to be born, will transform us in ways we never expected. Amen.