So. Right there in the first couple of lines,
Luke says a word that embarrasses some Christians today, and he says it twice. It says “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel
was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin
engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's
name was Mary.” Virgin. Virgin! Twice he says it, but he doesn’t emphasize it
like Matthew does, who uses it as a kind of living proof-text, where we’re told
that it all took place to fulfill a prediction by Isaiah, who said—referring to
something that was going to happen in his own time—“Look, a young woman shall
conceive and bear a child, and he will be called Emmanuel.” And Matthew,
following the Septuagint, mistranslates the Hebrew word for “young woman” as “virgin;”
he adds helpfully that the Hebrew means God with us.
But
even though Luke doesn’t use the virgin comment as a lynch-pin
of his argument like Matthew, he does say it twice, which is a subtle
way of emphasis—he could have just said “her name was Mary” after
all—and so he wants us to know it, he wants us to get that she was a virgin,
and so almost two-thousand years ago began the near-deification of Mary, her
use as a theological sound bite, a interpretive
lens through which we view the Christ. Today, she’s used almost as a punching
bag, sometimes; liberal Protest theologians say “Bam!
Take that! There was no
virgin birth, it’s ridiculous to say such a thing, and those primitive
beliefs are holding us back, keeping us from entering into the twenty-first
century and attracting shiny, new, modern Christians.”
And
conservative evangelical theologians say “Pow!
Take that! She’s a litmus
test for true Christianity, a slippery slope down which we must not slide. If you don’t believe in the Virgin Birth”—and
they always capitalize it, Virgin Birth—“Then you’re not a real Christian, or
not a real good Christian, anyway . . .”
And don’t even get me started on the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception, which holds that Mary was always a virgin, never did anything
untoward or . . . nasty . . . and thereby warped the
brains of generations of Christians, who leapt to the understandable conclusion
if the World’s Greatest Woman got that way because she didn’t have sex,
and sex must ergo be bad . . .
Man! We Christians have really messed
up what is essentially a sweet story of God doing something new, something
untoward . . . and I wonder how Mary feels? I wonder what she thinks of being an
icon in the ongoing wars between the right and the left, what would she have
felt, little slip of a girl that she was . . . she was probably thirteen or so, they got married early in those days, and she was betrothed to one
Joseph, a tradesman, a working-class, blue-collar kind of guy who probably went down
to Fountain Square and did the Chicken Dance every Fall. And he was of the house of David, a pretty famous house in those parts,
because the prophecies foretold it,
you understand, they foretold that the house of David was going to be restored,
and Messianic expectations had been running high for several generations or
so. The Messiah, the anointed one—in Greek “Christ”—would be of the house of David, a king come, or so the tale went, to
restore the house of David and its glorious, earthly reign.
And
Gabriel comes to Mary in the sixth month, and it’s important
that we realize what it is that it’s the sixth month of—it’s the sixth month of
her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy, a pregnancy that in itself was
miraculous, a pregnancy that recalled the coming of the Lord to Sarah in her
old age. Elizabeth was
barren, and past her child-bearing years, and God—like God did to Sarah—opened
up her womb. And so it’s in the context
of one miracle that another is done, as listeners and receivers of this good
news, we must keep that in mind: the miracle of Jesus’ birth is in the context
of John’s. But it’s a greater miracle
still, for if John the messenger is born to a barren woman, Jesus the
Christ, the subject of John’s message, is born to a virgin. And virgin trumps barren any day of the week.
Anyway. The angel Gabriel comes to Mary, and we
should stop just a moment and see how significant that is. A messenger from God, a mouthpiece of God
comes to a woman, just like Jesus himself
would come to the woman at the well, the angel has come to a person that wasn’t
even allowed to sit at the feet of
the teachers, who wasn’t even allowed, really, into the temple, only into the
women’s gallery around the edges . . . it was kind of like where the black folks were allowed to sit at Clemson University football games in the bad old
days, on a hill overlooking the stadium, the women were allowed in a place kind
of around the outside, on the margins, but here Mary was center stage. The angel—and it wasn’t just any old angel,
it was Gabriel, one of the senior management—the angel comes to Mary. And
here again, it’s greater than the case of John, or at least a lot more
wondrous: because the good news of John had come to Elizabeth’s husband,
as the patriarchy demanded, but the Good News of Jesus, the gospel of the
Christ, had come first to a woman.
And
so right at the outset, this is marked as something that is unprecedented, at
least in terms of inclusiveness: the angel comes to the marginalized one, the
one that,
if not last, is certainly not first, to announce the birth of the
savior of the world. Could this be kind
of a foretaste of one of Jesus’ primary preaching points? Could it be a herald of what he would repeat
over and over again, that the last shall be first and the first shall be
last? Staid old traditional Matthew didn’t
mention this apparition. No. In Matthew, the announcement comes to Joseph,
and then only when he was about to put Mary away for infidelity,
but Luke starts off with it, and it shows why Luke is a favorite of
progressive preachers everywhere, he seems to have the most inclusive view,
seems to take most seriously the universal appeal of the gospel to everyone,
Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female . . . and so you can imagine what
Mary was thinking when an angel came to her, or maybe you can’t . . . Luke says
she was much perplexed, and I suspect this is an understatement, but as was her
way, she pondered what sort of greeting it was going to be, but not for long,
because the angel told her not to be afraid for, contrary to what it looked
like—angels weren’t always the bearer of glad tidings—contrary to what she
might’ve thought, she’d actually found favor with God.
Throughout
it all, Mary maintains an almost preternatural calm, especially for one so
young . . . here an angel, a messenger of God, tells her she’s favored by God,
and further that she’s going to give birth to the Son of the Most High,
to whom the Lord God will give the throne of David, who’ll reign over the hose
of the Jacob—that’s Israel—forever and ever, amen. And right here something strange happens: she
says “how can this be, since I am a virgin? And it’s strange because, as
novelist Ron Hansen has pointed out, why would she assume something miraculous
was going to happen? After all, she was
betrothed to a perfectly fine man, for all she knew her first born from that
union would be the Messiah . . . how did she know Gabriel was talking about her
becoming pregnant without the benefit of human aid?
Did
she intuit it? Did she sense something
of the moment? Did she somehow know that
the child within her would not be conceived of natural means? Whatever the case, the angel confirms her
suspicion: The holy spirit will come
upon you, he says, and the power of the most high will overshadow you; the
child to be born will be holy, called Son of God. And the angel reveals something else, as
well: her relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this
is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.
And
then the angels says something that put it all together, something that
reminded them of God’s good graces, God’s good providence: For nothing, Gabriel
says, will be impossible with God. And I
don’t know about you, but for me it evokes another time, another place, where
God opened up another womb . . . there in the tent at the oaks of Mamre,
when three celestial visitors—one of whom just happened to be God—when three
celestial visitors predict that Sarah will bear a child, after years of
barrenness, after she had long passed the time of child-bearing, the Lord said
“Why did Sarah laugh, and say: ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am
old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the
Lord?”
And
here, centuries later, comes the answer: nothing will be impossible with
God. Nothing will be impossible with
God! And it comes in the form not of
a mighty king riding on a great horse, not in the guise of a Pharaoh, riding
rank after rank of chariots, the answer comes to a slip of a woman, just a girl
really, in the back-water town of Nazareth.
Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?
And the answer is embodied, incarnate in the child that will be born in
just a few days. The answer is Jesus
Christ, born to a young woman, born in a stable. See? A
barren womb is opened. See? A childless woman is made whole. See? A
babe is born of a virgin. Nothing will be impossible with God.
And
it’s true: nothing is impossible with God.
Neither miracles, nor healings, nor ends to wars . . . neither feeding
the hungry, freeing the captives, or comforting the brokenhearted . . . nothing
is impossible with God. And if it’s
possible that a babe is born in a manger to rule the world, if it’s possible
that a fourteen-year-old child from Nazareth, betrothed to a carpenter, would
be the mother of the Son of God, why then it’s certainly possible that God will
renew our
hearts in the coming years.
If God can bring about the redemption of the world, whether on a cold
winter’s night or a hot June day, as some new calculations point to, if God can
bring about the redemption of the world on that first Christmas 2000 years ago,
God can surely redeem our hearts.
Christmas is a season to contemplate new beginnings, to look toward the
future, to renew our hope and expect God to do God’s part. As we celebrate God’s incarnation this year,
as we travel and entertain our families and guests, as we open our presents underneath
the tree, let us remember that the answer to all our questions has already
come, and will come again. Is anything too wonderful for God? No.
Nothing will be impossible with God.
Amen.
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