The Messenger, and Mary's Yes

Before any of it happened — before the shepherds, before the star, before the old priest in the temple — there was this: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was there in the beginning with God. Everything was made through him, and without him not one thing was made that has been made. In him was life, and the life was the light of people. And the light shines in the dark — and the dark has never put it out. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. He came to his own — and his own did not take him in. But to everybody who did take him in, to the people who trust his name, he gave the right to become children of God. And then the thing that had never happened before: And the Word became flesh, and pitched his tent among us. And we looked at his glory — the glory of an only son from a father — full of favor and truth. The tent in the wilderness was where God came down and lived in the middle of the camp. Only this time it is not a tent of goat hair and blue cloth. It is a person, and he grew up in a carpenter’s house, and people ate dinner with him. Nobody has ever seen God. The only Son, who is in his Father’s arms — he is the one who has shown us what God is like. His family was written down as carefully as any king’s — fathers and sons and fathers and sons, all the way back to Abraham, and back past Abraham to Adam — so that anybody could see exactly where this man came from.

Four hundred years went by after the last of the prophets, and in all that time God’s people heard nothing. No prophet, no word, no vision. They came home from Babylon and rebuilt the temple and waited — and then the Greeks ruled them, and then the Romans, and still they waited, for the one God had promised. And then it started again, quietly: with an old man doing his job.

There was a priest named Zechariah, and his wife was called Elizabeth. Both of them were old, and both of them lived carefully and honestly before God — and they had never been able to have a child. There were so many priests in Israel that a man might only get one turn in his whole life at the greatest job of all: going into the holy place of the temple to burn the incense while everybody outside prayed. They drew lots for it. And one morning the lot fell on Zechariah. So he went in alone. And a messenger of the Lord was standing there, on the right of the altar of incense — and the old man was shaken to his bones with fear. And the messenger said, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah. Your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will have a son, and you are to call him John. And there will be joy and gladness for you, and a great many people will be glad when he is born. For he will be great in front of the Lord. He will go on ahead in the spirit and the power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of fathers back to their children — to get a people ready for the Lord.” And Zechariah, who had prayed for this for forty years, said, “How am I to know that? I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years too.” And the messenger said, “I am Gabriel. I stand in front of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And now look — you will be silent, and you will not be able to say a word, until the day all this happens; because you did not believe what I told you.” Outside, the crowd was getting restless, wondering why he was so long. And when he came out he could not speak to them at all. He stood there making signs with his hands, and they worked out that he had seen something in there. And he went home, and could not say one word to his wife about any of it. And Elizabeth found she was going to have a baby after all, and she said, ‘This is what the Lord has done for me.’

And six months later God sent the same messenger, Gabriel, somewhere else entirely. Not to the temple. Not to a priest. To a town called Nazareth up in Galilee, which was small and unimportant and a long way from anywhere — to a young woman named Mary, who was engaged to be married to a carpenter named Joseph. And the messenger came in to her and said, “Greetings, favored one. The Lord is with you.” And Mary was badly shaken by that, and stood there turning the words over, trying to work out what sort of greeting it was meant to be. And the messenger said, “Do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favor with God. Look — you are going to have a son, and you are to call his name Jesus. He will be great, and he will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will be king over the house of Jacob for ever — and his kingdom will never come to an end.” And Mary said, “How can this be? I have no husband.” And the messenger said, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will cover you like a shadow — and for that reason the child who is born will be called holy: the Son of God. And look: your relative Elizabeth is going to have a son too, in her old age — the woman everybody called barren is six months along. For no word from God is ever impossible.” And Mary — who was young, and unmarried, and had just been told something that would cost her everything she had in that town — said this: “Here is the Lord’s servant. Let it happen to me the way you have said.” And the messenger left her.

And Mary got up and went, in a hurry, all the way down into the hill country of Judea, to the house of Zechariah and Elizabeth. She had nobody else in the world she could tell. And the moment she came in and called out a greeting, the baby inside Elizabeth jumped — and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and cried out at the top of her voice: “You are blessed among women, and blessed is the child you are carrying! And why should this happen to me — that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For look, the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby inside me jumped for joy. And blessed is the woman who believed that what the Lord told her would happen!” Two women in a kitchen in the hills, one old and one young, both of them carrying something impossible — and one of them the first person on earth to say it out loud. And Mary answered her with a song. She was a village girl, and the song is full of the words of the old prophets, so she must have known them by heart. It went like this: “My soul makes the Lord great, and my spirit is glad in God who rescues me — because he looked at his servant when she was of no account at all. And from now on every generation will call me happy, because the Mighty One has done great things for me. Holy is his name, and his mercy is on those who fear him, from one generation to the next. He has done a strong thing with his arm. He has scattered the proud and their proud ideas. He has pulled rulers down off their thrones, and lifted up the ones nobody noticed. He has filled hungry people with good things, and sent the rich away with nothing at all. He has taken hold of Israel his servant, remembering his mercy — just as he said to our fathers, to Abraham and his children for ever.” And she stayed with Elizabeth about three months, and then went home.

And when Elizabeth’s baby was born, the neighbors and relatives all came round, delighted; and on the eighth day, when the baby was to be named, everybody assumed he would be called Zechariah after his father. And his mother said, “No. He is to be called John.” And they said: nobody in your family is called John. And they turned to the old man, who still had not spoken a word in nine months, and made signs at him to ask what he wanted the child called. And he asked for a writing tablet, and everybody waited while he wrote four words on it: “John is his name.” And in that instant his mouth was opened and his tongue was loosed, and the first thing he did with the voice he had just got back was praise God. He said: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has visited his people and set them free — just as he said, long ago, by the mouth of his holy prophets. And you, child, will be called a prophet of the Most High, for you will go on ahead of the Lord to get his roads ready — because of the deep mercy of our God, in which the sunrise from on high has come to us, to shine on the people sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the road of peace.” And the whole hill country talked about it for months, and everybody who heard about it kept it in their hearts and said, ‘What is this child going to be?’ And the boy grew up and grew strong, and he lived out in the wild empty places, until the day came for him to show himself to Israel.