Transcript
From Luke’s gospel: “And the angel Gabriel came to her and said, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying.” O Lord, may thy word be my word, and if my word is not thy word, let thy people be cunning enough to see the same. Amen.
Luke is distinguished by the fact that he is the only Gentile author of a book in the Bible. It’s only Luke that gives us all of the detail about Jesus’ ministry to lost sinners, to those really outside the pale. He’s the only one for example who tells us about the sinful woman, a Gentile formally excluded from the covenant, formally despised by all the religious establishment of the Jews. You can see Luke’s ability to identify with those to whom Jesus reached out. The tax collector Zaccheus, the penitent thief, the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, the prodigal son, the Good Samaritan, all these stories are told only in the gospel of Luke.
You get all this emphasis on the inclusion of the Gentiles. When Matthew‘s genealogy of Jesus goes back to Abraham, the father of Israel. Luke’s genealogy goes back to Adam to make clear that Jesus is in the line of humanity and to emphasize all the folks that come in from the outside in terms of receiving Christ’s ministry.
Coming out of a Hellenistic context, Luke was accustomed to the denigration of women. In his time, women couldn’t even sign their own marriage contract; they had to have their father sign it. They couldn’t decide where to live; that had to be decided by their father communicating with the new groom working out the details. The marginalization of women was standard procedure.
Luke has an intense interest in telling stories from the perspective of women. If you compare Luke’s writings to the others, things just jump out at you. For example, the nativity narratives are told by Matthew and Luke. Matthew tells the story from Joseph’s point of view. Joseph has the only speaking part. Mary says nothing. Luke tells the story from Mary’s point of view. Mary who was at the foot of the cross, Mary who was there with the disciples after Jesus’ ascension, praying together with all the other believers and being part of the Pentecost experience, who was with Jesus from conception, who taught him to speak, who taught him to be kind, to love God and other people. The intimate details Luke gives us of the annunciation and nativity of Jesus are details that only Mary could know. He got them by interviewing Mary in Ephesus where she lived in her later years.
The angel Gabriel approaches Mary and says, “Hail, Mary, thou who art highly favored. The Lord is with thee.” (Luke 1. 28) Hail in Latin is Ave. Translated into plain English it’s a simple Hello! or Hi!, the kind of greeting you say to passersby as you’re walking in Valley Forge Park. The Greek could be just as easily translated, ‘Cheers!’ Ave is what 2 John verse 10 says we’re to say to everybody.
This is where, based on Jerome’s Latin translation in the fourth century, we get the prayer, “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” The Rosary’s first part is what the angel says to Mary; the second part is what Elizabeth says to Mary.
“Highly favored,” the angel says. That sounds cheerful. Then he goes on and says to her, “The Lord is with you.” Again, that sounds like something you’d be glad to hear, wouldn’t you? That would be your natural reaction. If an angel came to you visibly you’d be scared out of your mind. But if you just heard an angel say these things to you you would think of them as nothing but affirmations.
But that is not how Mary takes them, and we are meant to notice that. We read, “Mary was greatly troubled”—not just because he was a glorious terrifying angel whose appearance would reduce us all to wobbling terror—but no, she was greatly troubled at his words, and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.
Why is she troubled by Gabriel’s announcement? Because Mary knows the Bible inside and out.
“And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has looked with mercy on my lowliness, and my name shall be forever exalted.” The Magnificat which Mary sings is a song that is absolutely jam packed with scripture. It’s based on Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel 2, another supernatural birth when Hannah was infertile and couldn’t have a child and then God blessed her with a little one, a great figure in the unfolding of redemptive history whose name is Samuel. Hannah sings a song that is very much like this, has lots of parallels with it.
But Mary doesn’t just use that song, she sprinkles in phrases and lines from more than fifteen other Old Testament texts. And Mary, it just came out of her heart; it’s a tapestry of scripture. She is praying scripture. She’s a wonderful model for us in praying scripture, and she puts it all together in fresh ways, building on Hannah’s song. And because she knows the Bible so well, as she’s listening to the words of this angel, she knows that when God says “I am with you” you’re in big trouble.
“I am with you”—that’s what God says to Moses in Exodus 3 when he sent Moses out of retirement back to Egypt to rescue Israel out of this bondage of slavery.
“I am with you” is what the angel of the Lord said to Gideon right before he was called to deliver Israel from the hand of the Midianites with his band of 300 unarmed men who had lights and horns going against 135,000 armed camel-riding Midianites. The Midianites invented blitzkrieg warfare, rushing in on their camels like the Walkers in George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Back. Gideon is hiding in a cave using a winepress to thresh wheat, fearful of the Midianites, when the angel of the Lord greets him. “The Lord is with you.”
“I am with you,” is what God said to Jeremiah in Jeremiah 1 verse 3 right before he calls Jeremiah to a life of a prophet to denounce the whole leadership of Israel, all of its kings, princes, prophets, and priests, and announced the overwhelming judgement that is about to overtake Judah with the Babylonians, a message that was so seditious and so hated that it won for Jeremiah a prison sentence and could easily have ended in his death.
The angel of the Lord said “I am with you,” and he also said “You who are highly favored” and this same kind of background could be adduced for that.
So no wonder we read that Mary “was greatly troubled, and wondered what sort of greeting this might be.” And the response that the angel gave to her being troubled is not all that much more helpful. The angel said to her, “Don’t be afraid.” Once again, look at the Old Testament. When it takes God to tell you or his angel to tell you “Don’t be afraid,” humanly speaking there’s a lot to be afraid of! That’s always the case. Noah is told, “You’ve found favor in the eyes of the Lord” and that’s right before the massive flood by which all humanity was judged.
All of these things by someone who knows the Bible as well as Mary did set off all kinds of alarm bells in her mind, and humanly speaking we’d expect her to respond the way Moses did: you’ve got the wrong person.
Then comes the most terrifying news. “You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus.” That is carefully chosen vocabulary, and in the Greek of the Gospel of Luke it’s almost word for word identical to the prophecy back 700 years earlier in Isaiah chapter 7. “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and will give him the name Emmanuel.” God with us.
Ten minutes before services of Holy Eucharist here, before our masses, the sacred ministers—the people who will be up here in the chancel near the altar—gather in the choir room to get our game faces on, to pray. And if I’m leading the prayers, the prayer that I almost always say goes like this: “O God our King, by the resurrection of your son Jesus Christ on the first day of the week, you conquered sin, put death to flight, and gave us the hope of everlasting life. Redeem all our days by this victory. Forgive us our sins, banish our fears, make us bold to praise you and to do your will. And steel us to wait for the consummation of your kingdom on the last great day, through Jesus, Christ our Lord.” In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
