"The Annunciation" by Leonardo Da Vinci
A mother and her
young son were driving home from church one Sunday and the mother asked her
son, “What did you learn in Sunday School today?”
The young boy
responded, “Well, Mom, today we learned about the time when Moses was leading
the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt across the Red Sea. They got to the
water and Moses knew his people couldn’t make it over. So, he asked some of his
men if they would build a bridge over the Red Sea, and all the people of Israel
walked over the bridge. But when the Egyptians got there, they had their tanks
and guns and they just sank in the mud. So, Moses asked his air force to fly
over and bomb the heck out of them and they wiped out all the Egyptians.”
“Is that really
what they taught you in Sunday School this morning?”
“Well, not
exactly. But if I told you what our teacher really said, you wouldn’t believe
it!”
The story of the
first Christmas is, like the parting of the Red Sea, an unbelievable story,
humanly speaking. That’s because it is the story of a miracle. Perhaps no human
being on earth understood that better than a young woman named Mary who lived
2000 years ago. Let’s look at her perspective on Christmas as it is written for
us in Luke 1:26-38….
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town
in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph,
of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said,
“Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed
by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said
to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now,
you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 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 ancestor David. He will reign over the house
of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the
angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to 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 holy; he will be called
Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived
a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For
nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant
of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed
from her.
What is the miracle of Christmas? The answer is hinted at by five
statements from the angel Gabriel that Luke records for us.
First, the angel tells Mary that she is
to name the baby Jesus.
As we saw last week, this is exactly what an angel of the Lord told Joseph in
Matthew 1:21.
This points out
something interesting. Some people say that these two accounts of the virgin
birth were fabricated by the authors of the Gospels to emphasize Jesus’
uniqueness after the fact. However, I think it important to note, that one of
the foremost New Testament scholars of the 20th century, Raymond
Brown, said in his 500+ page book, The
Birth of the Messiah, “I think that it is easier to explain the NT evidence
by positing historical basis than by positing pure theological creation.”[1]
Let’s think about
this for a moment. If the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke had gotten
together and each made up their stories in collusion, they probably would have
worked out their tales so that both would be much more similar, and therefore,
to some people, more believable. For example, Luke would not have told about an
angelic announcement to Mary, and Matthew recount an angelic announcement to
Joseph. Either they both would have included both announcements or they would
have chosen to include one story or the other. Alternatively, if each author
had fabricated the stories separately, there probably would have been greater discrepancies
in the stories and not the obvious agreement that there is between Matthew’s
account and Luke’s. As James Boice has written, “There are differences, but
there is no mistaking the fact that we are dealing with the same story. There
are the same characters: Mary, Joseph, and the baby. Moreover, they are the
same people in both accounts and not merely the same names. Matthew’s Joseph is
Luke’s Joseph, and Luke’s Mary is Matthew’s Mary. Again, the great event, the
birth of Jesus Christ by miraculous means, is identical.” Thus, it is reasonable
to conclude that these stories may not have been made up at all, but that they have
a historical basis, that they are stories of true events passed down to the
authors of Matthew and Luke from various sources. Again, as James Boice has
written, “These accounts bear the kind of superficial differences but
underlying unity you find when independent witnesses testify to an event.”
So, in both
accounts we are told that the baby is to be named Jesus, which means “Yahweh
saves.” As we saw last week, this was a common name to give to a Jewish child
at that time in history; it is the same as the Hebrew name—Joshua. And the name
points to this child as the future Savior. You will recall that the angel who
spoke to Joseph said, “you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save
his people from their sins.”
The second thing that Gabriel says to
Mary is that “he (Jesus) will be great.” Now Gabriel also told Zechariah that the son born to him,
namely John the Baptist, would be “great in the sight of the Lord.” (Luke 1:15)
But Jesus’ greatness is seen in the lofty title that will be assigned to him
which we will examine in a moment. This pronouncement must have struck Mary as
remarkable, that her son would be great when she herself was of such humble
origin. Most country girls in Palestine at that time were betrothed at thirteen
and married at fourteen. Mary was betrothed to a carpenter who had probably been
apprenticed by his father at his bar mitzvah. Now Joseph was likely to be about
nineteen years old and he probably had his own business. But it is doubtful
that it was much of a business. In most of Palestine there was little lumber.
Some stately cedars grew in the powdery alkaline soil, but other than date
palms and fig trees and some fruit orchards, it was bald, hilly country.
Carpentry would have been a difficult trade by which to earn a living. Mary
must have thought it remarkable that her son would be great when she and Joseph
were so poor.
Next, the angel tells Mary why her son
will be great. Jesus
will be called the Son of “the Most High”. This title, “the Most High”, was
only given to Yahweh in the Hebrew Scriptures. So, the angel was saying, in
effect, that this baby was the very Son of God.
Then Gabriel tells Mary that the Lord God
will give his son the throne of his father David. In other words, this child will be the
Messiah. Furthermore, he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his
kingdom will never end. Gabriel’s pronouncement is reminiscent of Isaiah 9:6-7.
It is a political as well as a theological statement. Jesus is the true ruler
of the world.
So, when we put all of this together, we
see that the miracle of Christmas is that God became a human being. The miracle of Christmas, to put it in
the language of the Gospel of John, is the miracle of the Incarnation….
One wintry day
as a man was walking down the street, he noticed that someone had thrown a
sheaf of grain out on the ground. A flock of hungry sparrows had monopolized it for an unscheduled
feast. The man paused, then took a step in their direction. The birds became
uneasy. Another step, and their nervousness increased. When he was almost upon
them, the birds suddenly flew away, leaving their banquet unfinished. For a few
moments, the man stood there reflecting on what had happened. Why had those
sparrows scattered in flight? He had meant them no harm. Suddenly the thought
came to him: it is yourself; you are too big. Then another question pressed
upon his mind: how could he walk among those birds without frightening them by
his size? Only if it were possible for him to become a sparrow and fly down
among them.
The teaching of
Christianity is that God wanted to make himself known to us. But he is so big
that if he were to walk among us in all his glory, we would be frightened just
as those sparrows were scared by the man. But God could do something that
humans cannot do. The man could not become a sparrow, but God could become one
of us and thus make himself known to us in a way we could understand. That is
the big miracle of Christmas.
However, the grand miracle of Christmas
that we call the Incarnation was, as Matthew and Luke record, achieved through
the more specific, smaller miracle of the virgin conception. Three times in this one brief passage
Mary is referred to, or refers to herself, as a virgin. There is no mistaking
Luke’s point. Mary was a virgin, and the conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb was
miraculous, not only because it was the occasion of God becoming human, but
also because the Son of God was conceived, not through the normal means, but by
the Holy Spirit.
I think C. S.
Lewis well described this event when he wrote in his book, Miracles, that “The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who
created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and
before that a fetus inside a Woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it,
think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.”
The question naturally arises: how did
this miracle take place? Mary’s
question to Gabriel was not, “How can
this be?” but rather, “How will this
be?” Mary’s question differed from Zechariah who, when told by Gabriel about
the birth of his son, asked: “How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my
wife is well along in years?” (Luke 1:18) Zechariah doubted the veracity and
authority of Gabriel’s report and thus was struck speechless until after John’s
birth. Mary did not question the veracity or authority of Gabriel’s
pronouncement; she simply wanted to know the mechanics of how she would become
pregnant without having intercourse with a man.
Gabriel’s
response was that the Holy Spirit would come upon and overshadow Mary. The
angel did not explain the mechanics of how the Virgin Birth was to be
accomplished except to say that this child would be the product of the Holy
Spirit conceiving Jesus in Mary’s womb.
Again, I find C.
S. Lewis helpful at this point. He writes: “The Virgin Birth is a doctrine
plainly stated in the Apostles’ Creed that Jesus had no physical father, and
was not conceived as a result of sexual intercourse…. The exact details of such
a miracle … are not part of the doctrine.” (Letters
of C. S. Lewis, 232-233)
But why, you may ask, is this miracle
important? Gabriel
answers this question when he says to Mary, “So the holy one to be born will be
called the Son of God.” (Luke 1:35c) Thus, the story of the virgin conception is
important because it emphasizes Jesus’ identity as the Son of God.
Is it possible
to have Christian faith without believing in the virgin conception? Certainly,
it is. Paul knows nothing of the virgin conception, neither do Mark or John or
any of the other documents of the New Testament.
However, there is
something very fitting about the virgin conception as taught by Matthew and
Luke. It fits with the tradition of miraculous births throughout Israel’s history.
It fits with the work of the Holy Spirit taught throughout the New Testament. It
fits with what Paul writes in Romans 5. In Romans 5:12 we read, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death
came through sin … death spread to all because all have sinned…” Paul then
presents Jesus as “the second Adam”. Jesus was the beginning of a new line of
humanity. The virgin conception underscores this: Jesus did not inherit a sin
nature from his human parents, but rather a perfect nature from his heavenly
father. Because Jesus was a human being free of sin, he could live a perfect
life in fulfillment of God’s law, and because he was divine he could pay for
the sin of the whole world. As Paul puts it, “For just as by the one man’s
disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many
will be made righteous.” (Romans 5:19)
Another question commonly raised by
people today is: how are we to explain the virgin birth? In other words: how can
there be such a thing? This question is often asked because the dominant
worldview in our day is naturalism. Naturalism denies that there is anything
beyond nature, therefore there can be no miracles. But if you admit that there
is a God, then the possibility of God intervening in nature, the possibility of
miracles, exists. Miracles in general are a problem only to the naturalist, not
to the super-naturalist worldview. As Gabriel says: “Nothing is impossible with
God.”
Personally,
I could not have come to the point of having an adult Christian faith in the
supernatural without the help of C. S. Lewis. Therefore, I find I must quote
from him a third time this morning. Lewis writes of the Virgin Birth,
I can understand the man who denies miracles altogether: but
what is one to make of people who will believe other miracles and “draw the
line” at the Virgin Birth? Is it that for all their lip service to the laws of
Nature there is only one natural process in which they really believe? Or is it
that they think they see in this miracle a slur upon sexual intercourse (though
they might just as well see in the feeding of the five thousand an insult to
bakers) and that sexual intercourse is the one thing still venerated in this
unvenerating age? In reality the miracle is no less, and no more surprising
than any others…. No woman ever conceived a child, no mare a foal, without Him.
But once, and for a special purpose, He dispensed with that long line which is
His instrument: once His life-giving finger touched a woman without passing through
the ages of interlocked events. Once the great glove of Nature was taken off
His hand. His naked hand touched her. There was of course a unique reason for
it. That time He was creating not simply a man but the Man who was to be
Himself: was creating Man anew: was beginning, at this divine and human point,
the New Creation of all things. The whole soiled and weary universe quivered at
this direct injection of essential life—direct, uncontaminated, not drained
through all the crowded history of Nature.
If this miracle
of Christmas truly happened, it shows that no problem is too great for God’s
power and no person is too small for his love. If the Lord chose to show his
grace, his favor, to someone like Mary, then certainly he can show his grace to
us. If the Lord can accomplish a virgin conception, then certainly there is no
problem that we are facing today that is too great for his power.
Perhaps the most important question posed
by this passage of Scripture is this: what is our response to the miracle of
Christmas?
In one of his
Christmas sermons, Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic, theologian, and
preacher from the thirteenth century speaks “of the virgin birth as something
that happens within us. That is, the
story of the virgin birth is the story of Christ being born within us through
the union of the Spirit of God with our flesh. Ultimately, the story of Jesus’
birth is not just about the past but about the internal birth in us in the
present.” (Marcus Borg, The Meaning of
Jesus, 186)
I hope our
response to that birth of Jesus within us
will be like that of Mary: “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you
have said.”
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