Advent 4
Reading: Luke 1: 26-38
18/12/05
The story in today’s gospel reading is so familiar through nativities and carols and being read in churches every Christmas that it could easily be taken for granted, but it’s actually full of really important points about God’s relationship with Mary and the relationship he wants to have with us. I came up with seven things that seemed important to me. Seven is a special number in Jewish theology, a number of completeness I’ve heard it called so that, for instance, we have seven days in a week – six when God worked and one when he rested – and in my list were six things that God did and one response from Mary. That worked for me so let me share it.
1. God said he was with her. Gabriel, God’s messenger, visited Mary in her home, in friendly and familiar surroundings, with the exciting news ‘The Lord is with you’. But God will be with Mary in an extremely intimate way – she will carry him as a child in her body; she will bring him up as her son and he will be part of her family. Notice that ‘God with us’, Emmanuel, is one of the names used to refer to the Messiah in Isaiah’s prophecies.
2. God told her not to be afraid. Not surprisingly, Mary was ‘perplexed’ or ‘troubled’ by Gabriel’s words, depending on the Bible translation you read. But God says to her ‘Do not be afraid’. If you look through the Bible, you’ll find that this is one of God’s favourite sayings. Whenever he challenges anyone to do his will he says ‘do not be afraid, I am with you’.
3. God said he liked and approved of her. Next Gabriel tells Mary ‘you have found favour with the Lord’. Mary, God likes you and approves of you. Fantastic! Not because she is an especially good person, or attractive, or intelligent, although she may have been all those things. She was a young girl, preparing to enter an arranged marriage, living in a culture where she would expect nothing more than to bring up children and look after her family. Like Abram in Chapter 15 of Genesis, she had faith in God and it was credited to her as righteousness.
4. God gave Mary a purpose. Strangely, it was exactly the thing she would have been expecting out of life – to have a child, what every married woman expected at that time. God made a vocation out of something that could have been taken for granted. He made a short humble life into something that would have an impact far into the future. If she had lived her life differently, we would live in a different world today.
5. God answered Mary’s question. Mary was obviously a very practical person. She wasn’t flustered about the thrones and kingdoms; she wanted to know how she was going to become pregnant when there was no man in her life. And she wasn’t afraid to ask the angel of the Lord to explain himself. Gabriel gave her an answer; whether or not she understood it is debatable, but it serves to show that God does answer questions and prayers, although not necessarily as we would expect or want.
6. God gave her evidence that nothing is impossible for him. After hearing about the miracle that was about to happen to her, one could forgive Mary for being a little skeptical, so Gabriel gives her further evidence. He tells her of another miracle taking place: Elizabeth, Mary’s older cousin, who was considered to be barren, is six months pregnant. This is not an unverifiable story of the kind that gets circulated on the Internet or in the tabloid press. It was something happening to a family member, a real person who she could (and does) visit. ‘For nothing will be impossible with God’ Gabriel tells Mary.
Those are the six things God did for Mary. What can we take away from that for ourselves?
Through Jesus’s life and death God remains with us now, he is with us in this place and when we go out into our community, our homes and our workplaces. He is with us in all places and situations, familiar and unfamiliar, comfortable and challenging. Jesus told his disciples not to worry about their lives, that he would give them everything they needed. It’s a difficult message to take on board and to put into practice. Sometimes I just seem to end up worrying about all kinds of details that I can’t possibly control and it’s good to be reminded that actually God is taking care of all that. God loves us because it’s his nature to love, as our God and creator. But, as Jesus, who lived as one of us, he likes each of us as potential friends too. We might be really high maintenance friends sometimes, but even so, that is the relationship he wants with us and we can and should feel encouraged by that.
God has a purpose, or a role, for each of us in his overall plan for the salvation of the world, although it probably isn’t obvious and it may be very mundane, but we don’t know what impact we could have on future generations. We should keep asking God to show what he wants to do, and how he intends to do it – he will reveal things in time, what we can understand at the time we can understand it. He will also give us evidence in the same way, showing us things that will encourage our faith to grow, which leads me to the seventh important thing I took from this morning’s gospel reading, Mary’s response to her contact with God:
7. Mary trusted God. ‘Here I am,’ she said, ‘the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ Like Abram, who became the father of the people of Israel; like numerous prophets and kings of Israel; Mary had faith in God and did as he asked. God has a habit of using unexpected people: Jesus was illegitimate, born in a stable, brought up as a carpenter not a king; amongst his disciples were the poor, the sick, the fearful, the humble; children, women, fishermen, tax collectors and prostitutes. None of them were people of particular influence at the time and yet here we are today remembering them and feeling their influence. Who knows what God has in store for each of us?
The advent study course this year is based on a book entitled ‘If you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat’. It’s a reference to the story in John’s gospel, of Simon Peter climbing over the side of his boat to walk to Jesus in the middle of a lake. It was an act of faith; he trusted Jesus and God to enable him to do the impossible because he, like Mary, knew that nothing is impossible with God.
We are part of what Jesus referred to as the generations who have not seen and yet have believed. So already, just being here as part of this church family, we’ve taken a step of faith. Don’t be afraid to take another, and another. Nothing is impossible when God is with us.