26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, 27 to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”29 But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. 30 And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. 32 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, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
34 And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
35 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. 36 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. 37 For nothing will be impossible with God.” 38 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.
39 In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, 40 and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, 42 and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! 43 And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? 44 For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. 45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
46 And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
50 And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
52 he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
55 as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”
56 And Mary remained with her about three months and returned to her home.
It was the Christmas season of 1999 when Tonia and I visited my parents in a suburb of Washington DC and announced to them that Tonia was expecting our firstborn. I wish I could say that I remember the reactions, but I don’t. However, I’m pretty sure that it was positive and contained the particular joy that surrounds childbirth.
Childbirth…babies = good things. And I declare this as someone who isn’t that into babies. I recall years ago at our old church before one of the gatherings a woman in the congregation was walking around holding one of our babies, and I was struck to find out it was one of ours. I hadn’t recognized it. (I recall the woman being appalled by that.) Babies all look the same to me. When someone says, ‘so-and-so looks like this uncle or cousin,’ I’m nodding my head and thinking, ‘I just see generic baby.’
Back to the point, even someone who responds to babies so meagerly knows that pregnancy announcements are to be celebrated with great joy. Actually, every stage of the process – conception, pregnancy, birth – is wonderful. The Scriptures bear witness to that; when you open the biblical story, you’ll notice this continual emphasis placed on childbirths. In fact, whole chapters contain nothing but birth records: ‘so-and-so begat so-and-so and he lived for this long….
There are two big reasons for the Bible’s Big Story’s preoccupation with childbirth: 1) Human beings are made in the image of God. Humans are image bearers of the Most High Creator, and thus each one has a dignity and importance that is simply staggering. The Scripture’s focus on births of people whom we otherwise know nothing about supports a high view of human beings.
The other reason that the Bible’s Big Story focuses on childbirth goes back to the very beginning of the story. Having been deceived by the devil to distrust God and disobey Him, the first Image Bearer begins to die while unleashing death into the world, which is his dominion. Well, in the aftermath of that victory of the devil, God tells the devil that he’s on the clock, that someday One will come into the world and will destroy him, and that Champion will be a descendant of Eve…a male human. From then on, every childbirth contained some hope – – maybe this is the promised Image-bearer who will defeat the devil and rescue those under the spell of his powerful lies? And then once the Image Bearers are delivered, the whole world under their charge… the Cosmos… can be saved and restored to order!
Well, you come to the end of the Old Testament writings and, sure enough, the Bible’s Big Story is progressing and we now know more about the Human we’re expecting. We know he’ll be a descendant of Abraham. Then that he’ll be from the family of Judah. A thousand years after Abraham we’ve also discovered that he’ll be in the kingly line of David.
Yet, at the end of the OT, even though we’ve zoomed in on a particular family tree – the line of David – still all the kids branching out from him (and everyone else for that matter) are the kind that sit in the high chair, spoon up the apple sauce, fix the attention of their mom, and then turn over the apple sauce onto the floor. In other words, every kid coming out of his mother is an image bearer who’s fallen short of full righteousness; he’s not the way he’s supposed to be. Ruin and misery mark their ways. Fundamentally it can be said about every dadgum human borna and raised: None is righteous, no not one/ no one understands/ no one seeks for God. All have turned aside/ together they have become worthless/ no one does good/ not even one.
In other words, at the conclusion of the OT writings, we’re still waiting for that Son from thatline to be born!
All helps to explain why, when we open the New Testament writings and pick up the story again, we find mentions of Abraham (1:55, 73) and of David (1:27, 32, 69, 2:4, 11). And we’re immediately confronted with more talk about conceptions, pregnancies, childbirths.
But now, at the start of the NT, we readers sense something: The Spirit has “taken up the pen” again because of a unique childbirth. And here we find the finale. YES! There are many clues that we’ve reached the end of our wait for this child long expected. Descriptions about his birth are being drawn out. In fact, we don’t just have one child being born… we hear of a child being born to announce THE child being born. We overhear fatherly reflections and motherly reflections. We’re immersed in details. Baby movements in the womb. Details about first cribs. And swaddling cloths. And – for the first time in the history of the world – a multitude of angels enter our dimension. And they’re pumped up about the birth of the One, the promised Image Bearer, son of Abraham, son of David!
That’s the huge backdrop of the Christmas story. Now, during this Christmastide, I want to spend the remaining two advent sermons looking at all these goings on through Mary’s eyes. Especially by considering Mary’s poetic response to what’s happened, entitled “the Magnificat,” as found in 1:46-55. Today is mainly just introductory.
But before we get into it… let’s talk about Mary! The eternal Son, the Logos, is God and has been with God the eternal Father from the beginning. But when the Son entered time and space in the flesh as an image bearer, it was in and through Mary’s womb. Mary the God bearer… while she was yet a virgin! And people get bored with Christianity!
As the story has been told and re-told, there have been accretions built up around Mary. Some Christians want to say that Mary, who was a virgin when Jesus was conceived, remained a virgin throughout her life. That’s unnecessary to believe and almost certainly not the case. After all, we discover later in the gospels that Jesus had half-brothers.
A major inaccuracy regarding Mary is that she was born free from original sin – the doctrine of immaculate conception.
Generally, the tendency in some quarters has been to paint Mary more brightly than do the Scriptures. In the Bible’s Big Story, Mary is never denigrated, but as the Jesus story proceeds, there are scenes when Mary isn’t presented so swell and scenes when Jesus seems to be deliberately creating distance between the two of them. Find examples in Mark 3:21, Luke 2:48, Luke 8: 19-21, and John 2:4. The general take-away is that Mary isn’t any uber-mensch, but rather that she’s a human being – a creature of great potential and yet that fundamentally falls short.
Though we can’t leave it at that; we should say more! Because the Spirit also lets us know that Mary was singled out for a great vocation, and because God has conferred this on her she is worthy of high respect. “Blessed are you among women…why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to meet me.” Not out of her own special nature but because of the vocation she’d been called into, Mary is worthy of our highest esteem.
Mary is uniquely blessed by God and – as with all who are blessed – she thus becomes a blessing to others – that is, a means by which the life of God flows into the world. After all, we who are saved are saved through childbirth… and she is the one giving birth!
And besides Mary’s unique blessedness in being chosen to carry the Son of the Most High, Mary is also one of God’s great gifts to the Church in her role as the first disciple of Jesus Christ. Mary is the first and, in several ways, the prototypical follower of Christ. At pains to herself, she blazed a trail for disciples after her to follow. She’s an example for us to emulate.
Let me settle on that last point: Mary – who I’m glad to confess played a unique, high, unrepeatable role in the Big Story of Freedom – as the first one to receive Christ is an example for us to emulate. Her response to what God was doing in Christ was….FAITH-FULL. Let’s learn from her. Today just one brief point:
- In her receiving Jesus Christ, Mary demonstrates the high good of SINCERITY.
Instead of saying “I magnify the Lord and I rejoice in God,” we hear Mary uttering My soulmagnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. What’s the difference between the two? With this roundabout focus on her interior self, Mary is highlighting that her joy in God isn’t superficial, something that was quickly put on that could be just as quickly put off, something rote or merely dutiful or a formality. With my soul…my spirit…we understand that deep down in Mary, God had her attention.
In other words, she wasn’t going through the motions.
The world is filled with the double-minded and even frauds, and more than a few of those gravitate toward religion. What marks out these insincere ones is external noisiness while, on the inside – in their mind, in their attention – nothing substantial is taking shape. Concerning them, Jesus quoted from the prophets: “This people draw near me with their lips, but their heart is from me.” They talk a good game…maybe even have fooled themselves…but at the center of their intelligence and purpose and remembrances God isn’t that important.
I said they talked a good game. But as far as Mary goes, for all the attention she’s received in the history of the church, we don’t even know much about what she said. The authors of the gospel have her speaking up only four times throughout the gospels, a mere 188 words, three quarters of which words are in this Magnificat!
Instead of focusing on her piety or even showcasing her religious insights, our author, Luke, wants to stress the general fact that there’s a lot going on on the inside of Mary. Luke 2:19, 2:33, 2:51.
Mary is the opposite of those doubleminded or religious frauds: she’s not spouting pieties or putting on a religious affect… spitting holy words as the Mumford & Sons song puts it…but deep down…on the inside…where nobody can be wowed… she’s closely tracking God. She’s scrutinizing what’s going on around her, linking it to God, piecing it together, mulling over what He’s up to. It’s not what’s happening on the outside of Mary that’s remarkable; it’s all the focused reasoning within.
Learn from Mary, brothers and sisters. We moderns tend to fall into the trap of emotionalism. We associate religion/ God with dramatics and outbursts of emotion. Throw in a dash of weirdness. But the first disciple’s sincere faith is discovered in her attentiveness to what is happening around her, then mulling over those things in light of what she’s learned from God’s word. Collecting evidence, reasoning…and then the total response.
Brothers and sisters, tend to your heart (by this, I don’t mean “emotions” but rather your core beliefs/expectations/habits of thinking/priorities/understanding.) It’s easy to put on an act, even to fool ourselves, that we are responding to God. The Gospel of Luke is full of these cases: people who’d you think are following God actually aren’t sincere, and vice versa. Reading through that gospel we learn that we can hide a fundamental insincerity behind social or religious activism, “excusable” procrastination, family loyalties, emotionalism, greed… while still having the look of drawing near to God. But the heart/mind/spirit hasn’t changed!
Mary, the first disciple, shows us the better way. Not frothy, loud emotionalism. But then neither a certain religious look. Nor a certain formula of words. But rather in your heart, in your soul, in your spirit…away from where people can admire or congratulate you – an attentiveness to the details, a thoughtfulness that assembles data and strives toward the big picture, that wells up into rejoicing in the God of Jesus Christ who 2000 years ago has already come and saved you.
Here’s one of the magical things about Jesus, and maybe this’ll seem a little deep: The way you respond to Jesus is the truth of how you’re responding to God. And your response to God tells the truth of who you are. We could erase the middle and it’d still make sense: your response to Jesus is the truth of who you are. So, attend to how you’re attending to Jesus. On the one hand, God says to the shallow and double-minded: Don’t suppose you’ll receive anything from the Lord. (James 1:7). On the other hand: “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”
Leave a Reply