Luke 1:26-38
26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a
town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 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, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
35 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. 36 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. 37 For no word from God will ever fail.”
38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.
Mary’s Miracle Baby Has Miraculous Love for You
Do you ever read a book and realize that you’ve turned the page but you don’t remember what you just read? Or do you ever read a news article looking for one specific fact or figure that you end up missing what the rest of the story was about? I’ll confess that I do something similar with the Bible sometimes.
Maybe this is unique to me because I’m a pastor and this is my profession, but sometimes I have a tendency to strip-mine Scriptures. I read a passage like this and I parse every word. I can tell you the tense, voice, mood, person and number of every verb. I can tell you the case, gender and number of every noun and adjective. I can point out to you the proof passages – especially in a passage like this – for doctrines like the virgin birth, the dual nature of Christ, original sin.
But the problem with strip-mining Scripture is that you’re just using it for parts. It’s not personal. It can become just another collection of facts that you memorize but don’t mean anything to you.
But that’s the thing that sets Luke’s Gospel apart. He is anything but a dictionary of doctrine. Luke is incredibly intimate and personal. It’s like he sucks you into the page and allows you to become a part of the story. You can sit next to Mary and imagine how it must have felt to have an angel visit you.
Mary was just a lowly lady living in Galilee. There was nothing special about her. She was a very normal young woman. She wasn’t married, although she was engaged. She lived in the no-name town of Nazareth in the backwater province of Galilee, which wasn’t exactly known for producing great people. In fact, when Jesus was older, that was one of the stumbling blocks that prevented people from believing in him. They said, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?”[1]
And yet, to this average, lowly lady living in Galilee an angel of the Lord appeared. Gabriel came to deliver a message of great importance, not just to the life of this lowly lady but for the whole world. He starts out by saying, “Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you.”[2]
“Mary,” Luke says, “was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.”[3] The greeting itself was pretty common. People would often say something like, “Peace be with you,” or, “the Lord be with you.” What caught Mary’s attention was that this celestial angel was calling her, of all people, “highly favoured.”
Some people hear those words and imagine that Mary wasn’t so lowly after all. She may have looked it, but there must have been something special about her to catch God’s attention. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and the angel’s own words attest to her lowly status.
It wasn’t as if Mary was more worthy than any other lady in Galilee to receive this message. She hadn’t earned God’s favour. In fact, the root for the word “favour” is the same word as “grace,” which refers to God’s undeserved love. So, you could paraphrase the angel’s message to say, “Greetings, you whom God loves purely out of the goodness of his heart, just because he wants to, not because you have done anything to deserve it.”
Mary was the recipient of God’s grace and favour, and in that way she serves as an archetype for all of us. We’re not worthy of God’s love and attention any more than she was. We’re not celebrities; we don’t come from a famous city, and even if we did, is that supposed to impress God? Does he owe us anything?
Even if you were the greatest humanitarian in all of Canada, should God reward you for doing what you’re supposed to do? We’re all commanded to love our neighbours as ourselves, and all the ways we are supposed to do that are spelled out for us in 7 of the 10 Commandments. That’s the standard; that’s not special. It’s only special in our eyes because we see so few people do it, because we see so much selfishness and sin in the world and in ourselves. By comparison, someone might appear better than someone else, but we still all fall short of God.
And yet, the miracle here is that God still favours sinners. He doesn’t write us off or disown us. You don’t have to deserve God’s love to receive it. That’s what makes it grace. God gives his favour freely to lowly people like Mary and lowly sinners like you and me too. In love that can be described as no less than miraculous, God still favours sinners. And to those sinners he comes with more miraculous news.
To Mary he promised, “You will conceive and give birth to a son.”[4] Talk about a miracle! Mary was a virgin. She wasn’t married yet. There was no earthly way that she could possibly be pregnant. This would be a very confusing message to hear. But the son that she would bear would be a miracle baby in the truest sense of the word.
Gabriel explained, “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.”[5] God is Jesus’ Father. God would put life in Mary’s womb in a supernatural way. God was bringing a very special baby into this world through the lowly lady living Galilee.
Gabriel goes on. He says, “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.”[6]
It would be enough of a miracle for a virgin to give birth, but the child Mary would give birth to would be the fulfillment of a promise God had made long ago. We read about it in our First Lesson for today from 2 Samuel 7. God had promised King David that one of his offspring would sit on his throne forever, and 1,000 years later here he was!
But this wasn’t about an earthly kingdom. It wasn’t about making Israel great again. It was the continuation of a promise that God had made repeatedly throughout the centuries. It was the same promise God had given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden that one of their offspring would crush the head of their enemy, the devil. It was the same promise that God had made to Abraham that one of his offspring would be a blessing to the whole world. In all 3 cases, that one offspring was the same person, and that promise was the same. It was the promise of our Saviour from sin. It was the promise of Jesus.
He was born to defeat the devil and win the victory over sin and the grave. He did that by being what Gabriel said he would be, i.e. by being great and holy. Jesus lived a perfect life. He always did what his Father in heaven wanted him to do. He lived according to the 10 Commandments. He loved his neighbour as himself. And he loved his Father in heaven more than anything else in this whole world.
And it was precisely his love for God and his love for you that motivated him to sacrifice his life on a cross. That’s the penalty for our sin. When we fail to do what God wants us to do, when we do the things he forbids us from doing, we deserve death. That’s the wages of sin. But in his love for you, Jesus sacrificed his life and went to the cross to forgive your sin, to wash it away and remove it from you forever.
That’s how Jesus became a blessing to you and everyone on earth, just as God had promised Abraham. That’s why this promise that Gabriel made to Mary wasn’t just for her. It was for the whole world. It was God’s promise to you, that Jesus would be a blessing to you by forgiving your sins and giving you eternal life in his name.
That’s what Gabriel means when he says that Jesus would “reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”[7] It wasn’t an earthly kingdom. He didn’t come to make Israel great again. He came to reign in heaven, where you will live with him forever, because he loves you. The miracle baby promised to Mary has miraculous love for you.
And even though an angel from heaven has never come to visit you, God’s message still reaches you through the preaching and teaching of God’s Word. God still sends messengers to you; maybe that’s your pastor or your parents, your boyfriend or girlfriend, your wife or husband. You can hear the angels’ voices when you read the Bible’s pages. And that’s no less a miracle than when Gabriel visited Mary. God is still with you, and he promises you that you are highly favoured too.
Sometimes we lose sight of that promise this time of year. There’s so much to be done before Thursday comes. We can get stressed and overwhelmed and end up overlooking the comfort and peace that our God gives us through message of Gabriel to Mary. Her son is our Saviour. He came to be our King. He came at Christmas in fulfillment of God’s promise, and he promises that he’s coming again.
Come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly. Amen.
[1] John 1:46
[2] Luke 1:28
[3] Luke 1:29
[4] Luke 1:31
[5] Luke 1:35
[6] Luke 1:32,33
[7] Luke 1:33