The story Luke wants to tell us begins with two pregnancies, both quite impossible. Luke first introduces us to Zechariah and Elizabeth, who, he tells us, were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments of the Lord. But they had no children, and both were getting on in years. Some of you may hear echoes of Abraham and Sara.
One day, the angel Gabriel came to Zechariah and told him that Elizabeth would bear him a son, and that he would name him John. The old man found the angel’s announcement difficult to believe, given the circumstances. Yet soon, Elizabeth, whose hair once was black as the night but now was silver as the moon, became pregnant.
It was in the sixth month of that impossible pregnancy when Gabriel was sent to a town no angel had ever heard of, to talk to a young woman about God’s plans for the future of the world — a future that had a lot to do with her. “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” The angel’s words sounded very matter of fact: The Lord is with you. You have found favor with God. You will conceive and you will bear a son. You will name him Jesus. The Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. I imagine Mary raising her hand at some point as though she could slow the torrent of angelic announcements with a gesture, saying, “Hold on, wait a minute, you lost me when you said I would conceive – how exactly is this supposed to come about? I am a virgin.”
Luke tells the story with Mary asking just one question, “How can this be?” She doesn't get to ask any of the other questions we think she might have had, like, How exactly is this surprise pregnancy supposed to be a favor? How am I supposed to explain this to my parents or to Joseph? And why me? Don’t you know that folks in the village will shun me or perhaps even stone me to death for getting pregnant out of wedlock? Can this wait until I’m married? But in Luke’s story, all she gets to ask is, “How can this be?” And the angel speaks of the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the power of the Most High, and of the child’s holiness — and only indirectly of her, Mary whose body would be at the center of these divine arrangements. Mary is much perplexed, and, in at least one commentator’s imagination, the angel isn’t a picture of calmness either. Frederick Buechner wrote,
She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with the message to give her, and he gave it … As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings, he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.” [1]
Mary’s answer mattered. She would not be coerced to bear this child. She could decline the favor.
Many artists have tried to capture this scene. In the monastery of San Marco in Florence, the tiny cells on the second floor still look very much the same as they did in the 15th century when Fra Angelico painted the walls with the most beautiful biblical frescoes, most famous among them The Annunciation.[2] Gabriel is standing on the left looking at Mary on the right, who is kneeling on a wooden bench. Nothing in the painting clearly indicates what has or hasn’t been said between the two; they look at each other, both holding their arms close to their chests, both with apprehension in their faces.
I like to think of the picture as capturing the moment right after the angel has finished speaking. This is more than a matter-of-fact announcement, “Here’s what’s going to happen.” This angel didn’t just come to deliver a message and return to heaven. This angel is having an advent moment; this angel is waiting, waiting for Mary’s answer.
When Herbert O’Driscoll was a child growing up in Ireland, his parents would often take him and his siblings to their grandparents’ farm. John Brennan was a hired man living in a thatched cottage on their farm, and in the evening after the cows were milked, he would sit on a large flat stone outside the stable door and smoke his pipe. Sometimes little Herb would sit beside him and listen to the old man’s stories.
One night, as they were sitting together outside the stable, John told the boy to look up into the sky. The moon had appeared, still ghostlike because the light of the sun was not fully gone. Here and there, the odd star could be seen.
“Do you know,” said John, puffing on his pipe, “do you know that the stars and the sun and the moon move around all the time?”
Herb said he did, he knew a lot about the universe.
“Well,” said John, “do you know how the angel Gabriel came to Mary the mother of our Lord to tell her she would have a child?”
Herb said he did, he knew lots of Bible stories.
“Well then,” said John, looking skyward as he spoke, “do you know that when the angel asked Mary if she would bear the holy child, all the stars and the sun and the moon stopped moving? Did you know that?”[3]
Did you know that Gabriel and all the angels in heaven stood in breathless suspense? God had chosen Mary, an ordinary girl in an ordinary town, for reasons she didn’t understand, to be the mother of the Son of God — what would her answer be? What I see in Gabriel’s face in that fresco at San Marco is the whole host of heaven holding their breath and waiting: God had spoken – what would Mary say?
And Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
“How can this be?” she had asked, and Gabriel’s response had only given her a lot more to ponder, but she answered like one of the great prophets of old, giving herself to the service of God for the salvation of the world.
When Fra Angelico painted The Annunciation on that wall in one of the cells at San Marco, he used perspective and the layout of the room to make it look as if the scene were happening then and there in that very room, right next to the window. The people who lived and prayed and slept in that cell didn’t just have a religious painting on the wall; they lived and prayed and slept in the space, in the silence that opens between hearing God’s word and responding to it with the courage of faith.
Luke’s Gospel opens with this story not to dazzle us with the miraculous circumstances of Christ’s conception. We’re invited to hear Luke’s witness and to listen for the word of God in the text with the same openness as Mary and her readiness to be part of God’s redemptive work in the world. She had much to ponder, and she questioned, and she could have declined the proposal, but she said yes, and not because she had to, but because she wanted to. And her yes was not the end of her questions or her ponderings, but she trusted God enough to take this huge step, to give birth to the child who would turn the world upside down. She became the first to believe the good news of Jesus.
When I was a little boy, I had a part in the annual Christmas pageant for years. I started out as a sheep, and eventually I got to play one of the shepherds and the inn keeper and Joseph – but I never was cast to play Mary. I appreciate the kindness of the adults who didn’t want to ask a little boy to play a girl. I’m much older now and I have come to believe that Luke invites us all to play Mary’s part: to receive the word of God with faith and to nurture it — within us and among us — like mothers and midwives care for new life that wants to be born.
Wherever and whenever the good news of Jesus Christ is proclaimed, God comes to ordinary people in ordinary towns with this extraordinary message that is both a favor and a call: to carry Christ for the world. You too have found favor with God. You too have been graced with the word of God, which calls forth life out of nothing — and now God and all the angels in heaven, and the sun and the moon and the stars, and a world longing for wholeness — all stand in breathless suspense, waiting for your response.
What will you say? Will you say, “I’m sorry, I already had other plans for my life…” Or will you reply — not really knowing what you’re getting yourself into but trusting the word that the kingdom of God is near — will you say, with courage and humility, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
[1] Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 39
[2] The famous version of the annunciation is in the hallway http://www.wga.hu/html/a/angelico/09/corridor/annunci.html One of the cells is home to another, strikingly simple rendition of the scene http://www.wga.hu/html/a/angelico/09/cells/03_annu.html
[3] The Christian Century, December 13, 2003, 18.