The Birth of Jesus Foretold
26In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”29Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. 31You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32He 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, 33and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”
A few months after appearing to Zechariah, Gabriel is sent to speak to Mary. This account is one of the reasons Biblical scholars believe that Luke interviewed Mary for his gospel. Mary is the only one who could have known about this encounter. Mary would have been an old woman by the time Luke interviewed her, and if you picture her telling Luke this story decades after everything that happened to her son, I wonder how she felt about some of the angel’s promises to her.
In verse 27, Luke tells us twice that Mary was a virgin. I imagine Mary stressed this point to Luke when she told him about it. While it’s true that the word for virgin used here can also mean young woman, it’s also true that Mary would not have been betrothed to a righteous man like Joseph had she not been a virgin. And Mary’s question in the following verses also reinforces that she had never been with a man. Biblical scholars believe that Mary was probably 15 or 16 years old when the angel appeared to her. If she had been any older, in that time she would have been considered an old maid. Imagine getting this news at 16!
The depiction of angels in art has always bothered me. The thin, pale, slightly effeminate looking guys with wings, or even worse, the fat little babies with tiny wings on their backs. Angels are awesome, eternal beings who stand forever in the presence of Almighty God! That’s why every time an angel appears to anyone in the Bible, they always have to say “Fear not!” And this was no ordinary angel, this was the archangel Gabriel, second only to Michael among the archangels. No wonder Mary was afraid!
I wrote a song based on this passage several years ago called Fear Not, from my CD Sin No More. The message of that song, and to me, one of the messages of this passage, is that just like God was saying “Fear not, the Lord is with you” to Mary, no matter what we’re afraid of, he wants to say the same thing to us. Fear not, the Lord is with you!
But Mary wasn’t just afraid, she was perplexed, and not just about the whole virgin birth thing. When Gabriel first greeted her, before he told her anything about what was going to happen, she was puzzled by the mere fact of his greeting. Gabriel told her she was highly favored, and that the Lord was with her. Mary, as a poor peasant girl, probably never thought of herself that way. At that time there was no middle class. There were the rich, and royalty, and everyone else was pretty much dirt poor. If I lived in the circumstances that Mary probably lived in, I wouldn’t think of myself as especially blessed by God.
Though Mary was a witness to the resurrection, she probably still wondered about Gabriel’s promises to her in verses 32-33. As Luke interviewed her decades after her son was gone, what must she have thought about the promises that God would give Jesus the throne of David, that he would reign forever, and that his kingdom would never end? Those things are still in the future for us 2,000 years later. As Mary related that quote to Luke, Herod Agrippa II was on the throne, Paul was imprisoned in Herod’s palace, and Jesus had ascended into Heaven. I can’t help but wonder how she felt about that.
34“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
35The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called[c] the Son of God. 36Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. 37For nothing is impossible with God.”
38“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.” Then the angel left her.
Mary asks essentially the same question that Zechariah asked, but Gabriel answers her question rather than striking her dumb. In the Amplified Bible, her question goes like this:
34And Mary said to the angel, How can this be, since I have no [intimacy with any man as a] husband?
That makes it pretty clear about Mary’s virginity. If she and Joseph had “been together” before that time, how much worse would her punishment have been than Zechariah’s for claiming she was a virgin? In fact, if she had not been a virgin, some other girl who was a virgin would have been chosen instead, so that Isaiah’s prophecy could be fulfilled.
Gabriel’s answer to Mary is revealing. We probably all have some mental image of what Jesus’ conception might have been like, and some of those images may be embarrassing and crude. But the image Gabriel gave to Mary was very clear to her. She knew exactly what he meant. Look at the Amplified Bible’s version of Gabriel’s answer.
35Then the angel said to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you [like a shining cloud]; and so the holy (pure, sinless) Thing (Offspring) which shall be born of you will be called the Son of God.
The power of the Most High will overshadow you like a shining cloud. What Gabriel is describing is the Shekinah glory of God, as in the way God spoke to Moses from within a cloud (Exodus 16:10, 19:9, 24:16, 34:5, 40:34). This was also the sort of cloud that appeared at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:5, (blog) Mark 9:7, (blog) Luke 9:34, (blog). I imagine that as soon as Gabriel left her, a cloud of the Shekinah glory of God descended upon her and surrounded her. What an amazing experience than must have been. What did God say to her during that time? What did she see and feel? I’ve heard that women can sometimes immediately tell when they have conceived. After that experience with God, Mary would have known without a doubt that she was pregnant.
Then Gabriel says, “But wait, there’s more!” and tells her about Elizabeth. When Mary heard that Elizabeth was pregnant, she must have believed, if she hadn’t before, that anything was possible. One more time, look at the Amplified version of this passage in verse 37.
37For with God nothing is ever impossible and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment.
When Gabriel told Mary that nothing is impossible with God, he more literally said no word of God shall be powerless. When God tells us something, we can count on it (Isaiah 55:10-11).
Mary’s response is what your response or mine should be to what God tells us; I am the Lord’s servant, and may it be to me as you have said. May we be as quick to submit to God and to obey him as Mary was!
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