More than the other three tellings of the Jesus story, Luke keeps the angels before us.  Those angels are busy!  It’s as if most people had stopped really expecting anything from God: it had been such a long time, such a long silence.  It seemed as if nothing had been happening and as if nothing, really, was going to.  Life was just life, this was the way it was and pretty much how it was always going to be: make the best of it while you had time, because the day would come when you didn’t.  Eat, drink, and be merry.  As for things God may have said about one to come, well, God had said a lot of things—people said God said a lot of things.

Then a message, and another, and several more, as if the time were ripe and the day had come, and suddenly all those long years of silence and apparent inactivity turned out to be careful preparation, deliberate planning and building up to the decisive day.  Just when you get to thinking God is doing nothing, has done nothing, and apparently will do nothing, it turns out He’s been at work all along.  It takes patience, perseverance, prayer, and faith to maintain such blessed wisdom.

Just after the muted priest Zechariah’s wife, Elizabeth, had gone public with her astonishing not to say unprecedented pregnancy, Luke tells us that God sends His messenger Gabriel on another mission, “to Nazareth, a town in Galilee” (1:26). Nazareth was not some isolated hamlet.  It was important enough, in its way, but it wasn’t like a really important place.  Sort of like Bethlehem, without the venerable history.  Nazareth was like Bethlehem before David came along.  What made David great, though, was God choosing him.

God sends Gabriel to a woman.  We shouldn’t pass over that too quickly.  Up to this point in Scripture, God has not personally manifested Himself by angels or otherwise to many women.  To a few men, yes, but not so many women.  Mary is in select company; Mary is unique.  She is unique not because of anything special about her, but because God has a particular purpose in mind for her.  God does not call to us or choose us because of anything He sees in us beforehand, as if of course God would want that person!  Nobody qualifies for God’s call.  God calls and chooses because it is His nature to choose and to call; He does so because He loves.  The alternative would be absence, and though God may even for what feel like unendurable lengths of time feel absent, Scripture assures us, many times in many ways, that God is continually calling, speaking to us, continually at work.

We are told that Mary is a virgin.  This is a term over which biblical scholars, especially over the last couple centuries, have wrangled.  It’s just too, you know, incredible that a virgin should miraculously become pregnant.  Impossible, ridiculous, balderdash—there must be some other explanation that squares with how we know things work.  God must answer to science, after all.  Biology has no way to explain Christ’s conception.  Science can’t account for it; therefore, it cannot and must not be true.  Why?  Because it can’t be explained by science.  Beloved, what else is science, as yet, unable to explain?  Do you know that scientists can’t really explain why people yawn?  Yet we all yawn, maybe even some of you here now.

A churchgoer told a pastor that he just couldn’t accept all this about a “virgin birth.”  Just not believable!  Rather than asking why, if that was the case, the believer found anything in Scripture believable, the pastor told the man it didn’t really matter.  Maybe the pastor was trying to say give it time.  Yet Luke, who claims to have looked into all of this quite carefully, Luke who, as we’re told, was a doctor, Luke tells us, with no apology or intellectual squeamishness, that the virgin will give birth.  Why?  Because that’s what the angel told Mary; because that’s what happened.  It’s so stunningly impossible that it simply must be true.  It’s God.  God does the impossible.

“The angel went to her and said, ‘Greetings, you who are highly favored!  The Lord is with you’” (1:28).  Now, if you’re here out of a Catholic upbringing, or if you’re just familiar with it, you know the “Hail Mary”: full of grace.  For centuries of centuries, the Catholic hierarchy has made much of this phrase, in ways that sent the faith off the rails.  Now isn’t the time to get into that.  Full of grace or highly favored: which is it?  The word we find in Luke’s telling is from the Greek verb xaritoō, which means to honor with blessings, or to make agreeable, especially to God.  I would say that to be made agreeable to God is to be honored with abundant blessing.  Now, how is anyone made agreeable to God?  Who makes someone agreeable to God?  The only one who can make someone agreeable to God is God.  The door has been closed, from our side, since the Fall.  Only God, from His side, can open it.  He does.  We are made agreeable to God by the initiative, the grace, of God.  Mary is abundant with grace, full of grace, just as any and every faithful one is abundant with and full of grace, because God has chosen to be favorable toward us.

In his letter to the believers in Ephesus, Paul uses this same verb when he writes in “praise of the glory of [God’s] grace, wherein He has made us accepted” (Eph 1:6).  God has made Mary acceptable to Himself for God’s purposes; God has purified her and blessed her; the corollary is that, apart from God’s action on our behalf, none of us would be acceptable to God, not even Mary!  God makes us acceptable to Himself through no prior qualification, innate merit, action or initiative of our own.  God acts for us because He is for us.  Gabriel is just about to tell Mary, and all of us, more about that.

Gabriel also tells Mary, as you may recall from the Ave Maria, “The Lord is with you.”  Mary is not the only one in Scripture to whom such words are addressed.  These are words that have been spoken to many who go on to bring great, miraculous, blessed success, victory, for God’s people: Joseph, Joshua, Samuel, David, and later the apostles.  As Paul writes to the believers in Rome: if God is for us, with us, who can be against us?  Victory is certain; so, too, opposition.  Victory is victory because there is opposition, resistance, rejection.

Mary may be young, without much experience of the world or the human heart, but she’s no fool.  She understands that God is addressing her with momentous words, that He has something momentous in mind for her.  And she knows she doesn’t know.  She knows she is young, with much yet to learn.  She probably fears that she doesn’t have enough wisdom, courage, or strength—maybe—ulp!, not even enough purity of heart—for whatever it is God is about to say to her.  No wonder, then, that “Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be” (1:29).  What’s coming next?  What’s about to happen?  What’s about to happen to me?

Gabriel hasn’t come to overawe her, much less to frighten, but to tell her something wonderful, beautiful, and holy: Life!  Hope!  Favor!  Grace!  “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.  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, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end” (1:31-33).  Would you be following all of this, if you were in Mary’s position?  A child, a son, to be named “God’s Salvation,” who will be as one of the great ones of Jewish history and given the highest title: God’s Very Own.  A fulfillment of the old promise, the thousand-year-old promise to David and to God’s people, that they will always have a king after God’s own heart, who governs after God’s own heart.

And then this, also—did you hear it?—this promised one’s “kingdom will never end.”  He will reign forever.  No one who dies can reign forever.  To reign forever must mean to live forever, and to live forever means that something unprecedented is about to happen, by God’s power and grace, something unseen, unknown, since those first wonderful days in the Garden, before we ruined everything.  It’s God.  God does what is impossible.  It’s not impossible for God, whose wisdom, knowledge, and love are beyond us and with us.

“‘How will this be,’ Mary asked the angel, ‘since I am a virgin?’” (1:34).  Zechariah got in trouble for asking questions.  He asked because, though his son was to be conceived in the ordinary way, Zechariah couldn’t believe it would happen—after all the years, all the tries, the tears, the prayers and disappointment.  If it hasn’t happened yet, why should it happen now?  Since it hasn’t happened, it can’t happen.  Since it hasn’t happened yet, it never will happen.  Impossible.

These aren’t words of faith but of dull resignation to fate, frustration, and disappointment, making one’s disillusioned accommodation to the silent, distant God who won’t, or can’t, do anything to change anything.  A God who doesn’t make a difference.  That’s not our God.

Mary doesn’t seem to be asking from doubt or scoffing incredulity, but because she knows that children are conceived in a certain way, and though she has been promised in marriage, that marriage had not yet been consummated.  She was a virgin!  How shall a woman conceive yet still be a virgin?  The Greek word used of Mary is parthenos, which typically means a young woman of marriageable age—unmarried, in other words.  Well, young, unmarried women are conceiving children all the time: there’s nothing extraordinary about that (which is a sad, impoverished way of regarding the matter, not to mention a commentary on our own times and souls).

Bible students have long understood that Gabriel is announcing the fulfillment of words God spoke through Isaiah long before: Isaiah ‘twas foretold it—behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, God-with-us.  Isaiah’s Hebrew makes completely plain that the young woman in question is a virgin: “the virgin shall conceive.”  Impossible but for the one for whom all is possible.  The whole point of the prophecy isn’t just that some young woman will have a boychild but that a virgin shall bear a son: something impossible, except for God—another singular, stunning reminder of the power, glory, grace, and love of God for His people, God who works miracles of salvation for us.  Nothing is too wonderful for the Lord.  All things are possible, with God: virgin births, raisings from the grave, all things made new.  To doubt the Virgin Birth isn’t really different from doubting the Resurrection, and if there was and is no Resurrection, “our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Cor 15:14).  To have faith isn’t to be a simpleton; to have faith is to enter into a trusting relationship with God.  I can’t, but God can.  I don’t, but God does.  To have faith is to dwell in the mystery.  We don’t know how.  God knows how.

Rather than expressing exasperation with Mary and her question, Gabriel explains, for Mary and for us: “The Holy Spirit will come [up]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” (1:35).  In the ancient Near East, kings were often called Son of God.  It was a way of putting a divine stamp upon the man.  The angel is telling Mary something different; it’s not that she and Joseph will have a son who will afterwards be adopted by God through some official, ceremonial, political act.  Mary will give birth, by the Spirit, to God’s very own Son.  God will come to His people, through Mary.  The Spirit, the outpouring of the Spirit, the power of the Spirit—this is at the very heart of what Luke is especially trying to convey to us in these early chapters of his account.

All through the Spirit!  Nothing without the Spirit!  Let’s keep our eyes and ears open for the Spirit: the power of possibility, of change, salvation, the power of faith.  Let’s keep our hearts ready, open, for the Spirit.  As we do, the Spirit also overshadows us, and new life begins for us.  God has the power; the Spirit is the power.  God wants all people to know the joy and peace of His lifegiving, life-making power.

The time of fruitlessness, of barrenness, is at an end.  The angel helps Mary to understand this more completely, telling her, “Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month”  (1:36).  And why?  Because “no word from God will ever fail” (1:37).  This also is a message from the very heart of Scripture.  In one sense, the Bible is a record of the ways in which people continually, constantly fail, as if we needed more evidence.  God’s response is a message of grace: “no word from God will ever fail.”  What does God promise us who have merited no promise?  I will forgive you.  I will save you.  I will bless you.  And what God says He will do, He does.

And how, then, shall we, being addressed by God through the words of this blessed book, how shall we respond?  Let’s take our cue from Mary, and say, “I am the Lord’s bond-servant [. . . .] May your word to me be fulfilled [may it be done to me, NASB] according to your word” (1:38).