Nine Lessons #5: Luke 1 (TW: pregnancy)

Photo credit: DanEvans | Pixabay

In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you.”

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.  But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favour with God.  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.”

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come 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.  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.  For no word from God will ever fail.”

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

Luke 1:26-38

It's impossible not to come to the above reading and start wondering how Mary would have felt.  Pregnancy: one of the significant changes that can happen to a woman's body, a costly change, and an intimate change.  It is so significant that many believe women should be able to terminate it of their own free will even once it has started, due to, among other things, the physical and psychological cost to the mother.  And all of this even applies without considering the social context of this particular pregnancy: out of wedlock at a time when a woman could be stoned for such a thing.

In asking her to be the mother of Jesus, God was not asking Mary to give her money, time or possessions; he was not asking for her actions or deeds or asking her to go somewhere; he was asking her to give her own body: to offer it to service in a way that would change her very being.  Not only this, but the job she was given was of such extreme cosmological purpose that we cannot even beginning to imagine.  It's mind-bending enough being pregnant with your own child, but having God-incarnate, that same one who created the universe, in order to deliver humankind from their sins, is off the scale.

Many people revere Mary as the essence of holiness and purity itself, but a Biblical understanding of the world has to lead us to conclude that she was a sinner in need of saving just as much as anyone else.   She was fearful when the angel arrived just like anyone else would be, she would have struggled with battling her own desire to be first just as we all do, and would have had moments, or probably more than just moments, where she fell far short of our image of a perfect, servant-hearted young woman.

However, when I read this passage, it was just three words that stood out to me:  The Lord is with you.  I read recently how even our faith itself is a gift from God.  It was that faith through the working of the Holy Spirit that Mary was able to say: “I am the Lord’s servant...May your word to me be fulfilled.”   

It is this kind of story that would be an anathema without a loving God.  I'm not even going to go into the reading of this story that would result if we judged God by human standards.   As it is, however, we even have Mary's voice in the matter, filled with the Holy Spirit, as she says shortly afterwards:

“My soul glorifies the Lord
   and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has been mindful
   of the humble state of his servant.
Luke 1:46-48

An all-powerful God who descends to the level of humanity - quite literally in the case of the incarnation - to meet us where we're at and give us all that we need to take our part in his wonderful rescue plan.