Luke 1:26-38: In the
sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named
Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of
David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings,
O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the
saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel
said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And
behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his
name Jesus. 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, and he will reign
over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
And Mary
said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
And 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 called
holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has
also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called
barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am
the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel
departed from her.
Beloved in Christ, you will hardly
ever find a better example of a Christian than in Mary. No, she was not without
sin. No, she is not our intercessor or a co-redeemer. She, like us, needed
Christ to be her Savior. And yet there is something special about her. She was
given the honor of being the mother of God. Her piety should shape our own, for
she sought to be nothing more than a faithful child of God. By being humble and
faithful, she was greatly exalted, and the same is true for us.
When we first meet Mary, we see an
angel appearing to her and greeting her: “Greetings, O favored one, the
Lord is with you!” She was greeted as one who had received the Lord’s
favor. What is more, the Lord was with her. But she is not the only one to be
greeted in this way. We too have received God’s favor and the Lord is with us.
But just hearing that greeting does not mean that we will appreciate or
understand it.
You see, God has been greeting
humanity for thousands of years, but that doesn’t mean that we have welcomed Him.
It all began when Adam and Eve heard the voice of God in the Garden of Eden and
immediately ran and hid themselves. God spoke loving, gentle words: “Adam,
where are you?” They were loving, for God wanted to have a tender
conversation with Adam and Eve. But Adam and Eve knew that they had sinned
against God by eating the forbidden fruit. They knew that they deserved nothing
but death, for death had been the penalty fixed by God for their action and
they had been warned in advance. All they could think of doing was hiding. It
was rather foolish when you think about, for how can one hide from God? But
they tried to, and we have been doing so ever since.
We, their children, have much to
fear before God. We have been given God’s holy law, and we (at least in our
saner moments) recognize it as good. We know that God intends only the best
when He demands that we worship Him alone and not any other gods, for
everything else will disappoint us in the end, just as the forbidden fruit
ended up disappointing Adam and Eve. We know that life is better if we are not
cursing, rebelling against our parents, murdering, committing adultery,
stealing, and lying. In fact, we know that it isn’t just these actions, but the
thoughts that lie behind them that bring us great misery. God has warned us
dozens of times, but we refuse to listen. We should have learned from sad
experience, but we haven’t. There is no fool like an old fool—and that is what humanity
is.
And so to hear a greeting from God
troubles us. It troubled Mary. She didn’t know “what sort of greeting
this might be.” But the angel elaborated upon his greeting. First, he
said, “Do not be afraid.” Now it is appropriate to have a healthy
fear of God, for that means we take His commandments and our sin seriously. But
God loves us and He wants us to take that love seriously. And so the angel told
Mary, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”
God loved her so much that He didn’t want her to be afraid. Now when we come to
the phrase, “You have found favor with God,” we could easily
misunderstand it. We could assume that Mary had done something great—perhaps
lived an exemplary life—and so deserved a special standing with God. But that
would be contrary to everything that the Scriptures teach. A better translation
would be, “You have received grace from God.” In other words, God
wanted to show His good loving kindness to Mary, purely out of the fact that He
is a good God and loves to give gifts, especially to people who cannot claim
any merit.
Think of what Mary could have done
up until this point in her life. She was a lowly teenage girl. She was no
apostle or some other leader among God’s people. She had no money to be a major
donor to the temple or a local charity. I am sure that she was not a wild and
unruly teenager, but she was probably like hundreds of young women then and
now, who live quiet, anonymous lives. But God loved her and wanted to do
something good for and through her. He gave her the privilege of being the
mother of Christ.
Now God doesn’t just love Mary or
the apostles or the great saints we always talk about. You too have found favor
with God. Just as Mary had nothing to boast about before the Lord, neither do
you. But that is all right. God comes to sinners who have no righteousness to
boast about. He brings His forgiveness and mercy. Indeed, He has been doing
this since the beginning of time. Adam and Eve ran away from God, but God
pursued them nonetheless. Yes, He chastised them for eating the forbidden
fruit. The curse of death was not set aside, but was confirmed. Nor did God
gloss over the troubles they had brought upon themselves by their disobedience,
for life would be full of toil and pain. But God also pursued them because He
wanted them to know some good news: He would defeat Satan, who had tempted us,
and He would reverse the curse upon mankind. Ever since then God has come to
His people with the word of forgiveness made possible through Jesus Christ’s
birth, death, and resurrection.
The words spoken to Mary remind us
that God has more than a vague plan to be nice to us. There was only one way to
reconcile us to Himself, namely, by God taking on human flesh and dealing with
our life and its problems while in the flesh. A mere wave of the hand from a
distance wouldn’t do the trick. No, God had to send His Son into human flesh.
Yes, at one time the Son of God was a simple zygote, a one-cell human being in
whom all the fullness of the deity dwelt, despite His weakness and smallness.
And yet this tiny child growing in Mary’s womb was none other than Jesus, “the
Lord saves,” “the Son of the Most High.” To Him by right belonged
“the throne of His Father David,” for His is an eternal kingdom
that encompasses the entire universe.
This is something that we cannot
entirely fathom. Mary rightly understood the angel to be saying that she was
going to become pregnant very soon, not in the distant future. She understood
that these words would be fulfilled as soon as they had been spoken, and not
after she and Joseph had settled down and were well into their marriage. But
she was a chaste virgin. She had taken God’s law seriously about matters of sex
and she knew that she was to abstain from sex before marriage and to be
faithful within marriage. She didn’t use the excuse that we might use today
that at least she was engaged to Joseph and that made it all right. And Mary
wasn’t stupid when it came to biology. People back then may not have known all
we know about biology, but they did know how babies came to be. You can’t have
a baby unless a man and a woman come together.
The angel revealed that God would do
something miraculous. “The Holy Spirit [would] come upon [her], and the
power of the Most High [would] overshadow [her]” so that she would
conceive a child. Only twice previously in human history had a human being come
into existence in an extraordinary way, in a manner other than the normal mode
of procreation: Adam had been created from the earth, and Eve had been
fashioned from one of his ribs. Now God would do something as miraculous and
astonishing as He had done in Eden, so that He could restore the lost world and
bring us back to Paradise.
And so this child was no ordinary
child. Adam and Eve had been formed in an unusual manner, but they were
ordinary human beings, nonetheless. But Christ was “the Son of God,”
for He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in such a way that Mary remained a
virgin. He was holy to a degree that even Adam and Eve in their state of bliss
had never been. He didn’t grow up to become the Son of God. No, He was already the
Son of God, even in His mother’s womb. He was the eternal Son of God already
when He was conceived. He was the Son of God when a few weeks later John the
Baptist leaped in his mother’s womb when he knew that the unborn Christ was
present. And thus we rightly call Mary the Mother of God. (She is not God,
but is the Mother of God, for Christ is God.) What a marvelous thing!
She is an ordinary human being, just like you and me, and yet the child she
bore was truly God, yes, even when He was still in her womb.
As I said, we cannot complete fathom
this truth. Mary couldn’t. Instead she simply said, “Behold, I am the
servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” That
should be our attitude too. God has drawn near to us. He has done all the hard
work of redeeming us. What can we say or do? All we can do is to say, “Lord,
You have spoken the truth. You have given me the gift I never deserved. You
wish to continue to reveal that gift through the words you speak. Let it be to
me according to Your word.” In Jesus’ name. Amen.
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