Mary Model Disciple (Advent 4, Luke 1:26-38)

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Three weeks ago, we likened Advent to getting ready for a guest. Even as we tidy our homes, do some baking, perhaps prepare a meal fancier than the usual fare when we know someone’s coming over, so we have been—or maybe “ought” to have been—preparing our hearts and lives to receive the Lord Jesus. Of course the focus in both sorts of preparing at this time of year is Christmas. How can it not be? But we’re wise to remember that Advent is about the Lord’s coming. Yes, his coming into the “tent” of our flesh, as John puts it, but also his coming for us at our deaths and his glorious appearing at the end of time as we know it.

We have stood with the prophets, imploring God to open the heavens and come down. We have stood knee-deep in Jordan river, listening to the wild-eyed preacher call us to repentance. Last week, we sang with Mary, “My soul is filled with joy, when I sing of God my Saviour. Everlasting is your mercy to the people you have chosen!” and reflected on St. Paul’s admonition to the Thessalonians to Rejoice! To Pray! And to Give Thanks! And his insistence that these acts were the working out of the sanctifying grace of God in our lives.

And this morning, we’re at the end. Not only is it the last Sunday of Advent, it is also Christmas Eve. God is coming. Right on schedule. You watch out. You better not cry. You better not pout. I’m telling you why. God is coming. Well no. Advent preparation is not about the fear implied in that silly song. (If you don’t shape up, no goodies for you!). It is about offering ourselves fully and unreservedly, warts and all, to the one who is coming. And that is what our Gospel lesson is about today.

It is the story of the Annunciation, when Gabriel interrupts Mary’s life with an Announcement that will change, literally, everything.

But first a little backstory. This is the second announcement that Gabriel makes in Luke’s Gospel. The first is to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist. In that story, we read that Zechariah and Elizabether were old, righteous, barren, and praying for a child, a son. Now, who does that sound like? Abraham and Sarah? Isaac and Rebecca? Jacob and Rachel? Manoah and his wife? Elkannah and Hannah? They are all there in the background. The story of the barren couple blessed by God with a singular son is a common one throughout the history of God’s mighty acts.

The first announcement is not a new story. It is a retelling of an old old story. And because of that, we are to be shocked at Zechariah’s doubt. Do you remember that part of the story? Zechariah knew the storied line in which he and his wife stood. And so, when Gabriel came to him, the angel’s message should have made sense. I mean, after the initial shock wore off of course. If you met an angel on your way to work, you’d be spooked. But after that, his message, “your prayers have been heard, you will have a son, that son will be great!” is exceptional surely, but also a perfect example of how God deals with his people. Yet another old, righteous and barren couple are, in God’s grace, about to have their shame removed, their prayers answers, and their names made memorable in the Great story of the Gospel.

And what does Zechariah say, “How do I know this is true?” Not how is this possible, but how can I trust you. The angel gives him a sign, which is also a punishment on his unbelief. And poor Zechariah is mute for nine whole months. (Maybe Elizabeth thought that was an extra gift!)

The second announcement contrasts in every way. Mary is first of all, unmarried. She should not be having a baby. Sometimes, people heap scorn on those poor unlearned first-century people for whom virginal conception stories were common and widely believed. There’s only one problem: it’s not true. First century people knew exactly where babies came from and how babies were made and there was no biblical precedent to expect an intervention of this magnitude. Mary was a virgin. She could contribute exactly nothing to the conception of Jesus on her own.

Mary secondly is not old. On the contrary. She’s young. On the cusp of being married. Much speculation, not all of it helpful, has placed here somewhere in her early teens. I have no idea how old she was. I know that my grandmother Perry was married at 18, and a mother at 19. That boggles my mind and I need no more boggling. However old Mary was, she was much much younger than the older, wiser, Zechariah.

Mary, thirdly, is not barren. Zechariah and Elizabeth had known the pain of postponed hopes, perhaps they had lost hope. Not only that, but in their time and their culture, childlessness—a sadness in and of itself—was a sign of divine displeasure. It was, literally, the way God cut off people. He ended their line. It was perceived as a divine judgment. Mary is not that way. She is young. She is engaged to be married. Presumably, she is capable of child-bearing.

Mary finally, is not exceptionally righteous. Luke makes a point of telling us that Zechariah and Elizabeth were models of holy living—thereby highlighting the pain and uniqueness of their childlessness. If anyone should be able to boast in a quiverful of sons, it is be this righteous couple. So it is that where we expect to find a description of Mary’s devotion, luke give us this. Crickets. So daunting was this silence that later Christians wrote down stories extolling Mary’s piety—how she herself was announced to St. Anne and St Joachim, how she was taken as a toddler by torchlight to the Temple where she was raised on food provided by angels, how she lived in seclusion after the age of 12 and remained undefiled, how she was sewing the temple veil when Gabriel met her. “Old wives’ tales” was what the Church Father Jerome called them. Luke says nothing.

Unmarried, young, fertile, unexceptionally devout. She is in every way ignorable. Until God comes.

“Greetings Mary!” My my. Artistic depictions of the event vary. Sometimes winged Gabriel kneels before Mary who seems utterly unsurprised. Sometimes he towers over an obviously frightened girl. Luke says nothing about the angel’s appearance. My favorite is  by Henry Ossawa Tanner. I think it gives us the same picture that Luke presents in his text—an utterly ordinary Mary greeted by a most extraordinary being with a most extraordinary message.

But back to the message . Greetings, Mary! In older versions, “Hail Mary!” The Greek word is a greeting and so these translations are accurate. But it is a greeting that means “Rejoice!” and, given Mary’s song of response which we sang last week, “My soul rejoices in the Lord. . . .” this is probably the better translation. “Rejoice favored one. The Lord is with you!”

That is what I like to call a Gospel nugget. Before the Gospel is a call to repent (and it is that!), before it is a call to change direction (for that is what repentance means), it is a call to rejoice because God’s favour rests on us. And it is only because such favour rests on us that we are even capable of repenting, of turning around, in the first place. 

But back to the story. Mary, we go on to read, was troubled. So Gabriel continues: “Fear not, for you have found favour with God.” And what does God’s favour look like? It looks like becoming pregnant without a husband and having a Son who will be called the Son of God. It looks, in other words, like a great shame—an unwed mother—and a great joy—the Son of God.

Now it’s Mary’s turn to ask a question: “pos toutos eimi?” “How can this be?” People sometimes wonder why Zehcariah was struck dumb as a punishment for unbelief while Mary wasn’t. Did they not both question Gabriel? Yes, they did. But the signs given in response were different because they asked different questions. How do I know versus How can this be. How do I know you are telling me the truth? Is very different from How is God going to pull this off? One is looking for reasons to believe, the other believes and asks for clarity. Both are given signs. One is both a sign and a punishment, one is a sign that invites and rewards faith.

And then the promise: “With God, nothing will be impossible.” What a wonderful promise. Mary cannot make herself the mother of the Saviour. She cannot by force of will bring it to pass any more than by force of will I can make myself King of England. But with God. . . . Hang on to that. I’ll come back to it.

First to the end of our story. I don’t know how long the silence between Gabriel’s announcement and Mary’s reply lasted. But whether it was a nanosecond or a minute, I’m sure it felt like eternity to the unnumbered angels—good and evil—who strained to hear what she might say. On the words of this young woman hung the fate of the world.

And here’s what she said: “Behold the Lord’s slave. May it be done to me according to your word.” The Lord’s slave. That’s important. Many modern translations want to soften the word to servant or maid, as though Mary chose to become part of some divine hospitality industry. But the word is slave. It’s the same word that Paul uses to describe Onesimus, the slave, that is, the property, of Philemon. It refers not to one who chooses to serve. It is the acknowledgement of one having been chosen for service.

So Luke sets side by side sovereign divine grace and a free human response and makes no attempt to solve it. The divine favour which rested on Mary equipped her freely to assent to Gabriel’s announcement and at some point thereafter, God accomplished the impossible when, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Son of God was conceived. (An aside—two miracles in the Bible that are acknowledged but never narrated—the conception and resurrection of Jesus. They are beyond telling).

Now what does all this have to do with us?

Well, for reasons I can’t go into this morning but which I’m happy to talk about later, Luke gives Mary to us as a model disciple. She is one whom, perhaps above all others, are to emulate in our following the Lord Jesus. And here, we have THE model response to God’s disruptive grace.

And that’s perhaps the first takeaway: the coming of God is always disruptive.

I don’t know how Mary expected her life to unfold. Perhaps she hoped for an ordinary even comfortable life as the wife of a techne—a skilled artisan—caring for a brood of children. Later depictions in Matthew, Mark and Luke suggest that she was a “hands-on” mom, willing even to physically restrain Jesus to keep him from harm. Maybe she even hoped that one of her sons would be the one to deliver Israel. Her song suggests that. But she did not expect what happened on the day Gabriel came. She was troubled by it. She asked how it was possible. She did not have all the workings of God clear in her mind. Her life was disrupted by the coming of God.

So it is for us, also. No matter how much preparing we do, whether at Advent or Lent, those times of the Christian year when we think about preparation, grace, God’s favour, God himself, when he comes, will always disrupt. It will overturn. It will challenge. It will change. For me, God’s disruptive grace came in a chapel service at Bethany Bible College. Laurel Buckingham was preaching; I have no idea what about. And in the midst of that sermon, there were no lights, no visions, no angels. Just a deep awareness that my steps were ordered. My vocational aspiration—law and perhaps politics—had to be set aside. God’s grace, God’s intervening favour has been a part of my life before and after, certainly. But that was THE point at which everything changed. The point at which grace disrupted.

Second, the coming of God does not preclude questions. Mary did not have it all worked out. How can this be? Is an honest and straightforward question. And, frankly, the angel’s answer, “Because God,” is hardly satisfactory. The important point to grasp is Mary’s disposition, though. Mary’s question arises from faith and so is answered. We are often, wrongly, told one extreme that any questions in matters of faith are sinful while at the other end, some insist with equal strength that certainty is what’s sinful. Taking Mary as our model refuses both. Hers is a faithful questioning, and that is the kind of questioning we are invited to ask, and ask boldly.

Further, although she received an answer, it was not a full one. And Luke’s later depictions of Mary on Christmas night and 12 years later on the journey home from the Temple portray her as pondering the events going on around her. The Greek word is “sunedesis.” It means “to mull over.” To keep on thinking about to keep on exploring the significance of to keep on wrestling with. Mary’s life of faithful questioning, faithful wrestling, faithful exploring is the life of a faithful disciple. The life of one on whom God’s favour rests. It is not a life riven by doubt nor is it a life of simple certainty. Both of those are, frankly, easy ways around the life of faith. Mary does not choose the easy way.

Which brings us to the third point: Slavery is the right way to think about discipleship. Mary assented to a divine choice when she said, “Behold the Lord’s slave. Let it be to me.” We don’t like that do we? We want to be the masters of our own ships, the captains of our own souls. But the Bible does not give us that option. The Bible gives us merely the option of masters. What does Jesus say? One cannot serve God or money. Service is inevitable; the only question will be who rules.

BUT. In slavery to God, Mary found the vocation for which God’s favour had equipped her. She became the mother of the Saviour. In slavery to God, she found freedom from the demands of the typical first century family. As the slave of God, she would not be a slave of anyone else, whether her father, her husband—and Joseph was a righteous man for certain, or any Roman occupier. She found freedom to such a degree that the Church universal rightly remembers her as the Second Eve, who like her foremother, acted on the words of an angelic being, but where the disobedience of the first Eve began our descent into misery, the obedience of the Second signaled the beginning of our great deliverance.

We may even say that Mary here embodies the wonderful paradox so ably expressed by Martin Luther, when he wrote these words: “A ‘Christian’ man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone."

In all of these things, Luke gives his readers, you and me, the Mother of the Lord as the ideal disciple. So, lest we get too focused on her, we do well to remember the last words of Gabriel and make them our last words this morning: “Nothing is impossible with God.”

The life of discipleship—Mary’s life and ours—begins and ends with grace and without that, without the unanticipated, interrupting, disrupting announcement of divine favour, it would be impossible. We are invited to look at Mary’s life and to see in it an example for us. Absolutely. AND we are invited to look at Mary’s life and our own, to see where God’s disruptive grace has entered, and say with the Psalmist, “This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes!” (PS 118: 23).

The God who calls us calls us warts and all. Loves us warts and all. Equips us and heals us, warts and all. He does not wait for us to be anything more than utterly ordinary. He is one who can be trusted, even to the degree that we offer ourselves wholly and without reservation, to Him.