Advent, Week 4: Luke 1:26-38
December 21, 2008
Will Fitzgerald
An opening quote: “It would be wonderful to be a church where faith as a place, and doubt has a place and love covers a multitude of sins.” (Bess Fitzgerald)
We know how this story ends, so it is difficult to place ourselves in Mary’s place. She’s young—maybe Jane’s age—and we know she’ll live another 30 or 35 years at least; but she doesn’t know that. She’s going to conceive and have a baby in nine months or so; but she doesn’t know that. That baby is going to grow up to be a teacher that many will follow; but she doesn’t know that. That son is going to be brutally murdered; but she doesn’t know that. God will raise him from the dead, and she will see him again in the flesh; but she doesn’t know that. She is an ordinary girl, still living with her family, engaged to be married, but she has never engaged in sexual relations—this is an important point, of course.
She is a just a normal girl, a normal person; her life is proceeding as most lives proceed. She lives in a normal town, in fact, a slightly downgrade city—“Can anything good comes out of Nazareth?” they say.
And then two extraordinary things happen. One she has no control over. One she does, I think.
That first thing: An angel appears to her, Gabriel, one of God’s key messengers. “Hail, Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with you.” Mary, God is with you; I have gospel, good news to tell you. Mary, You have God’s own favor.
Mary is a ponderer. As they say, she could see through a wall if she looked at it long enough. She is speechless before Gabriel, and can say nothing. She is perhaps a bit afraid and it shows on her face, for Gabriel tells her not to be afraid.
And then he tells her the good news: she is now going to conceive a child, who will be the Messiah who will reign over the people of Israel forever.
She thinks this over, and finally speaks: this can’t be true. She is a virgin. Notice, by the way, how clear it is that Mary and Luke and the original readers of Luke’s gospel understand the facts of life: You can’t have a baby without having sexual relations. She says she can’t bear the Messiah because of her virginity; Luke doesn’t have to explain to his readers why. Sometimes we pretend as if people in the old days didn’t know the facts of life. But that is ridiculous. They did. This also is important.
She thinks this over, and asks: How can this be, since I am a virgin?
Being visited by an angel was extraordinary, but Gabriel’s news is more extraordinary still: God is going to do the impossible. God is going to “come over her,” to “overshadow her.” In simple terms: God is going to impregnate her. The Holy Spirit and Mary will conceive a child: as human as Mary, as holy as the Holy Spirit: the Son of God.
Did Mary have a choice in the matter? I think she must have, don’t you? God set up moral laws which govern social life, and God decreed rape to be against God’s will (e.g., the laws in Deuteronomy 22). God cannot go against God’s own nature. Furthermore, Mary says:
Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.
In other words, she assents to Gabriel’s impossible news. She is humble before the Lord, and willing to do this great thing. She is willing, in the great tradition of Ruth and Hannah and the saintly women of Israel, to be God’s willing servant.
Note that Gabriel gives her news of her elderly cousin Elizabeth, telling her that Elizabeth, too, was pregnant, despite her age and previous inability to have children. This gives Mary more insight into the work of God. And, of course, she naturally goes off to visit Elizabeth in the hills, and Elizabeth’s baby quickens for the first time as Mary and the embryo Jesus enter the room. And Mary, reminded of Hannah’s song (1 Samuel 2:1-10), magnifies the Lord.
We live in an age of both credulity and scientific doubt. We enjoy watching and reading stories of super-heroes and vampires and other super-natural beings; we read the old Bible stories with a critical eye and wonder whether they could be true. Like Mary, we ask, “How can this be?” even as we fill our imaginations with stories of impossible things such the supposed redeeming value of violence, people who fly or cannot be killed. We know such things are just entertainments, they are truly impossible: the world does not, and cannot work that way.
But in Mary’s story, we have instead an impossible truth, which we declare in the creed:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.
My questions to us this morning is: how can we be open to the miraculous work of God in our lives? How can we “be a church where faith as a place, and doubt has a place and love covers a multitude of sins”?