‘May the Baby Jesus Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Mind’ (Luke 1:26-38, Sunday 31st October 2010)

For some inexplicable reason this phrase (‘May the baby Jesus shut your mouth and open your mind’) is emblazoned across the album art inside the first LP release of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Safe As Milk (1967). Whatever the good Captain meant by it, it is a very amusingly appropriate sentiment for the birth narratives of Jesus Christ. In fact, I think we should have Christmas greeting cards with this phrase! We need to be woken up out of our pragmatic slumbers and recapture the wonder of this earth-shattering Annunciation and Visitation!

In the previous passage of Luke’s Gospel we heard of an impossible birth foretold. In this passage we hear of an even ‘more impossible’ birth foretold!

26-27
God’s Initiative
Note the skilful parallelism between this birth-announcement narrative and the one previous: ‘The one account recalls and interprets the other… these scenes and especially these sons function together within the one purpose of God. Behind both chains of events thus set in motion, stands God, present via his messenger and the unveiling of his aim.’ (Green, 83-84, italics his)

It is again God who takes the initiative: he is always ahead of us, rushing to meet us long before we’ve thought to seek him.

More Theo-Comedy: Pomp vs. Obscurity
Observe again the theo-comic awe of this scene, from the throne room of God right down to a small town or village; from a supernatural high-ranking angelic being down to a poor, young girl.

Furthermore, this second ‘annunciation’ takes place not at the centre of the Jewish world, the Temple, but at ‘Nazareth in Galilee—insignificant, despised, unclean’ (Green, 84). If we expect an angelic visitation at all, we might expect it at the Temple, but not out in these outskirts!

‘Had we designed these events, pomp and circumstance probably would have attended the announcement and birth of Jesus, but God chose to use an average young woman and to announce his intentions in quiet obscurity. The fulfilment of God’s promise came to earth in an unadorned package of human innocence, without any pomp, far away from any palace. The promised one entered human life as he still seeks to meet it: at the level of everyday experience with everyday people.’ (Bock, 39; bold emphasis mine)

(Again, Luke names small-time, seemingly insignificant characters that history would have no other reason to know of. It reminds us that God knows us and calls us by name: see Ex. 33:17; Is. 43:1)

Christmas Mystery
We see a consistent meeting of supernatural and natural in Luke’s opening chapters – which creates a lovely and realistic-mysterious context for the Christmas season! Like the lights already going up, we’re starting early too!

Again, note Gabriel’s connection to the prophecies of Daniel and thus the ‘eschatologically charged’ atmosphere here. Luke also very briefly but carefully notes that Joseph is in the Messianic line.

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The Grace-Greeting
The word ‘favoured’ again points us to God’s grace. We aren’t told of anything about Mary that shows she deserves to be so favoured by God through some merit of her own achievement.

‘“Favored one,” then, functions as a name for Mary, designating her as the object of divine benefaction. This reality is accented and clarified by its repetition in v 30, then celebrated (with rejoicing!—v 47) by Mary in v 48. God has given his favor to one who had no claim to worthy status, raised her up from a position of lowliness, and has chosen her to have a central role in salvation history.’ (Green, 87, emphasis his)

Divine ‘With-ness’
‘The Lord is with you’ is a phrase that signifies God’s nearness to us and involvement in our human predicament. This language is ultimately fulfilled in the Incarnation (Immanuel, ‘God with us’, Matthew 1:23).

We cannot think of God as far off and aloof and be thinking of the Biblical God. ‘The Lord is with you’ is the consistent language of the Bible to describe God’s relation to us by his grace.

Also, ‘this language is often used in the OT with reference to a person chosen by God for a special purpose in salvation history; in such contexts this phrase assures human agents of divine resources and protection.’ (Green, 87)

God consistently promised ‘I will be with you’ to the people he called to serve him: e.g. Gen. 26:24 (Abraham); 28:15 (Jacob); Ex. 3:12 (Moses); Jer. 1:8 (Jeremiah); Acts 18:9-10 (Paul). Also, see Matt. 28:18 (the disciples—i.e. us!).

As and when God calls you to serve him, to participate in his purposes, he is in that very moment also promising to be with you to empower you to do his will. He never ‘sends us off’ somewhere to report back to him later. He goes with us into his mission in the world.

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Responding to God with Heart & Head
The words ‘greatly troubled’ or ‘much perplexed’ show again that for Mary in her humility this is completely unexpected! She’s thinking, ‘What?! Why me of all people?’

Mary knows this is a gracious, undeserved (and thus unprecedented!) visitation. She doesn’t think ‘of course God wants to send a top man down to give me a special message!’ Quite the opposite: she can’t really understand at all why God would want to visit her in this way. She’s baffled and a maybe a little flustered.

And in the words ‘tried to discern’ or ‘pondered’ we see Mary is a thinker! (A deep young lady!)

Here we have a believer responding to God’s revelation with both emotion and contemplation—heart and head (which should be our reaction to God’s word, the gospel, too).

30
Again, we see the consistent ‘don’t be afraid’ in angelic greetings. And Gabriel reiterates GRACE (‘you have found favour with God’).

31-33
The Name and Nature of this promised Child:
‘Jesus’ (or Joshua or Yeshua) means ‘Yahweh saves’.

Luke shows that this Child’s ‘greatness’ is infinitely greater than John’s. ‘Both are important in the realization of God’s redemptive will, but Jesus is primary.’ (Green, 84)

‘Son of the Most High’, ‘throne of David’, and the never-ending, everlasting ‘reign’ and ‘kingdom’ are all Messianic references, echoing Scriptures like 2 Samuel 7:13-14, Psalm 2:6-8, and Psalm 89: 20, 26-27.

34-37
God as Outlaw
‘According to Luke’s Gospel, God purposes to bring salvation in all of its fullness to all persons. But, as becomes immediately clear already in the birth narrative of Luke 1-2, this is not an aim that will be reached easily or without resistance. It requires the affirmative and committed responses of people like Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, Anna, and others (both in the narrative and outside of it), for God’s aim necessarily involves the collusion of human actors’ (Green, The Theology of the Gospel of Luke, 24).

I love that choice of the word ‘collusion’ here to describe God involving us in his purposes. It sounds dodgy and shady, like God’s doing something illegal and offering to let us in on it if we want a cut of the action! And, indeed, he is being ‘devious’ to the prideful authorities and powers that set themselves up in opposition to him. God is the Outlaw in this scenario, undermining and taking out corrupt human ‘lawmen’.

Mary’s Deep-Thinking Faith
So, in God’s ‘collusion’ with human actors that we’ve seen so far, what’s the difference between Mary’s questioning of the miracle and Zechariah’s?

‘Zechariah responds… with hesitation and unbelief. Mary, on the other hand, though she is only a young girl, embraces God’s plan, proclaiming herself as God’s servant.’ (Green, 84)

Zechariah requests a sign (‘How will I know?’) and Mary requests an explanation (‘How can this be?’): ‘a request for information, not proof’ (Wright, 12).

‘Although Mary’s role in the realization of God’s salvific will is crucial, the initiative and powerful work of God are much more so. Ultimately, the purpose of Mary’s question… is to emphasize that all of this is God’s doing.’ (Green, 89)

We may think that faith never questions or ponders or thinks through anything, but that to be authentic and pleasing to God it has to be rather naïve. But Mary here is an example of how ‘faith seeking understanding’ (as old philosophical theologians put it) actually helps to show God’s grace and power, to make it all the more clear that these things are of God and not of us. And so through this deep-thinking form of trust, Mary’s faith (and ours) actually grows deeper and surer than it would have without her thoughtfulness.

Mary is Not Left Alone in the Decision to Believe God
‘Mary’s faith is put on the line at the start. Will she believe that God has the capacity to create life within her? God does not leave her alone in the decision’ (Bock, 42).

God does not leave her alone in the decision. That is so crucial to see. God demands great faith of us, yes, to trust him for the humanly impossible. But even that trust in him is something he comes to our aid to enable us to respond to him with.

A Piece of Practical Evidence
Here Mary is given reassurance first in the form of practical evidence: another miracle in the life of someone she knows, her cousin Elizabeth. Notice how the fact that they are relatives is only just now revealed to us by Luke’s fine storytelling craftsmanship!

Connecting the Dots of Her Worldview
Secondly, God helps Mary’s faith to understand in the form of a theological-philosophical-personal word of reassurance. This comes in the form of the logically necessary and persuasive proposition: ‘If God, then all things are possible’ (see also Genesis 18:14).

This simple and elegant piece of reasoning reminds her of what she already knows (but hardly dares believe!) and helps her connect the dots of her worldview personally and intellectually. Gabriel gives ‘affirmation of the infinite possibilities with God… highlighted all the more by Gabriel’s denial of the impotency of any word of God’ (Green, 92).

Open to Omnipotence
Does this provoke and challenge our own worldviews? Do we need to connect up the dots of our worldview also? Do we need to see that what we say we believe (e.g. God is Creator and Redeemer of the world) entails other important truths (e.g. that God can reach into the world he made and work humanly impossible miracles)? Are we limiting God and the possibilities of what he can do?

I’m reminded of the famous philosopher, Antony Flew, who recently recanted his atheism and became a theist (though not a Christian). He entitles one of the chapters in his new book ‘Open to Omnipotence’. He realises the logic of his new worldview position. If there’s a Creator at all, then he’s powerful enough to reach into history and do whatever he wants to! For the seeker, it’s now a matter of recognising whether, where, and when he has done so!

I can’t help but note that as a student of philosophy I find Gabriel’s statement rationally impeccable! Sceptics often sound as if a ‘virgin conception’ is the thing that is so ludicrous, when in fact all they’re saying is that their worldview is atheistic and thus doesn’t allow for God creatively working in his creation in new and unique and surprising ways. But they have to disprove God to disprove this miracle (as a miracle). If the existence of the classically theistic (more specifically the Judaeo-Christian) God is granted, then the possibility (and indeed likelihood, given the truth of the O.T.) of a virgin birth is only to be epistemically expected.

It’s not that Gabriel’s declaration proves something. It just keeps things rationally consistent and sets the stakes thrillingly high. ‘If God, then all things are possible to him.’

Not a Tame Lion
If we can accept the Incarnation at all, then the Virgin Birth should look like a piece of cake after that!

So there’s just no getting round the ‘outside the box’, mind-boggling, divine mystery of the gospel! It’s just not every going to be humanly containable, take it or leave it. Just as they say of Aslan in Narnia: ‘He’s not a tame lion.’

Indeed, a number of philosophers and thinkers have found the ‘impossibility’ of the literal, historical Incarnation to be just the thing that helps them believe Christianity is true. It’s too outrageous a claim for a human religious system to just invent and maintain with such persistence and consistency. If God were to actually reach into our history to save us by his power, we surely must (in a paradox) expect it to look beyond all human expectation—and to be beyond all human comprehension, to be a profound and shattering Mystery. Otherwise it just looks like we’re making it up! God’s not going to ‘come down here’ and do something all sweet and safe and tidy and neat and cosy and digestible. No! He’s going to do something God-like to save us! (Of course!)

Historically Speaking
On a less philosophical and more historical note, it’s worth mentioning that the Virgin Birth was always scandalous, even to the early church, and thus not likely to be something they would just ‘make up’:

‘The ancient world didn’t know about X chromosomes and Y chromosomes, but they knew as well as we do that babies were the result of sexual intercourse, and that people who claimed to be pregnant by other means might well be covering up a moral and social offence. Yet Mary’s story is told by both Luke and Matthew, in versions so different that they can hardly be dependent on one another; in other words, the story seems to have been widely known in the very early church, rather than being a fantasy invented several generations after the fact. Why would these two writers, and devout Jewish Christian congregations that passed on such stories, have done so, giving hostages to fortune in this way, unless they had good reason to suppose they were true?’ (Wright, 9-10)

The Questions are Profound
‘Is God’s power such that he can create life and exercise sovereignty over it? This is a question Jesus’ birth should raise. Would people believe the claims surrounding Jesus? The questions are profound. Wonderful things come in surprising packages, but they can come, because God has the power to deliver them’ (Bock, 43).

How might Gabriel’s reassurance of God’s transcendent-immanent power and goodness and faithfulness (self-consistency) come home to us in our lives right now? (We should certainly first and foremost be reassured that whatever God promises in his word is not only eminently possible but also will in fact come to pass. Then we can also think about how he’s speaking into our day to day lives by his Word and Spirit about our specific life path right now.)

The Son of the Most High is Really and Truly a Human
Do note that ‘Luke has no thought that this might make Jesus somehow less than fully human.’ (Wright, 10) When we talk about the Son of God being born of a woman, we are not talking about some divine being in a human disguise—we are talking literally about God the Son supernaturally and divinely humbling himself to a measure we cannot fathom and actually being born as a fully human baby to grow to be a fully human man just like anyone else would.

Oh the Mystery and Magic and Myth of the true, historical story of Christmas!

Under the Dark Wings of the Holy Spirit
Again, we have the person and activity of the Holy Spirit (so in this passage we have ‘christology’ and ‘pneumatology’ mingled). Notice the Spirit’s ‘with-ness’ and power as the Paraclete (the Counsellor-Comforter who ‘comes alongside’ in John 15-16). This also relates to the very first appearance of the Spirit in Gen. 1:2 – pictured as a mother bird brooding, which is where later biblical imagery of being sheltered under God’s ‘wing’ is derived. And all this connects to Gabriel’s word-picture of how the Holy Spirit will ‘overshadow’ Mary (see also Luke 9:34; and compare Exodus 40:35).

Furthermore: ‘The Holy Spirit is identified with God’s power in a way that anticipates Acts 1:8.’ (Green, 90)

So even though this isn’t the Temple, a holy, glorious manifestation of God’s hovering presence is promised!

‘God’s creative overshadowing power’ (Bock, 42) – a mysterious but philosophically sound reassurance. ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon Mary, enabling her (as the Spirit always does) to do and be more than she could by herself. But at the same time “the power of the Most High” will overshadow her. This is something different: God himself, the creator, will surround her completely with his sovereign power.’ (Wright, 10)

We are in the midst of a mystery of mysteries here and our cleverest response is probably to bow and worship and receive the Lord’s presence and power through his word by the Spirit in the measure he lovingly and sovereignly gives us.

Just ‘a’ son of God? Lingering Possibilities
The ‘holy’ ‘Son of God’—Israel’s king had always been given the honorific title of ‘son of God’ but in vv. 32-33 the kingly sonship is taken an infinite step further: ‘This birth would be the first step in bringing the promise to David to its permanent, ultimate fulfilment. This long-held Father-son relationship was to reach unique heights in Jesus’ (Bock, 41).

‘As with a good deal of New Testament language about Jesus, this is both a huge theological claim (Jesus is somehow identified with God in a unique way which people then and now find hard to grasp and believe) and a huge political claim (Jesus is the true ruler of the world in a way which leaves Caesar, and the powers of the world today, a long way behind).’ (Wright, 11-12)

This is quite a huge claim in the mouth of a supernatural heavenly messenger. But the action will be homely and grassroots once again after this, leaving these promises and possibilities lingering in our hearts and minds just as they were lingering in the hearts and minds of these very regular people. We still need to ‘taste and see’ the truth and goodness of these claims for ourselves through a process of discovery.

‘Earth Up’ vs. ‘Heaven Down’: how most people meet Jesus today
Mary ‘did not understand the angel’s promise to be a declaration of Jesus’ ontological deity… the full implications of these statements will not be realized for some time. Luke chooses to present Jesus form the “earth up”—that is, showing how, one step at a time, people came to see who Jesus really was. He starts with Jesus as the promised king and teacher who reveals himself as Lord in the context of his ministry. Only slowly do people grasp all of what is promised.

‘This approach matches how most people today come to see who Jesus is. Drawing on two thousand years of theological reflection about Jesus, the church often tells the story from heaven down, but there is merit in Luke’s path. It is the path of people’s experience… Both approaches [e.g. John’s ‘heaven down’ and Luke’s ‘earth up’] are true; they are just different ways to consider the person of Christ. The church has tended to emphasize John’s approach, because it is the full story, but there also is value in unfolding the story gradually as Luke does.’ (Bock, 42)

A sense of appropriateness, hard to define, easy to recognise
‘Of course, no one is likely to be convinced of Luke’s story who isn’t already in some sense open to the possibility that Jesus, though certainly a fully human being, was also the one in whom Israel’s God had made his personal appearance on the stage of history. [Paul, of course, focuses exclusively on Jesus’ death and resurrection, never mentioning the virgin birth.] But to those who have come to some kind of faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, whose minds are thus opened to God being uniquely present to him, there is a sense of appropriateness, hard to define, easy to recognize, about the story Luke and Matthew tell. It isn’t what we would have expected, but it somehow rings true.’ (Wright, 11)

The Challenge of the Child
‘Put all this together – the conception of a baby, the power of God, and the challenge to all human empires – and we can see why the story is so explosive. Perhaps that’s one reason why it’s so controversial. Perhaps some of the fuss and bother about whether Mary could have conceived Jesus without a human father is because, deep down, we don’t want to think that there might be a king who could claim this sort of absolute allegiance?’ (Wright, 12)

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Mary as a Model for Believers
Study Mary’s response! Study and emulate her attitude and action! She is a great hero(ine) of the faith. (And remember her young age! Even ‘teenagers’ can hear and respond to and be used by God.)

Note: ‘It’s important to stress that the story says nothing about Mary remaining a virgin after Jesus’ birth. That’s a much later idea.’ (Wright, 10)

In the phrases ‘Here am I’ and ‘the servant of the Lord’ and ‘let it be to me according to your word’ we see how Mary finds her identity in God: that is, she is who she is in virtue of her humility, obedience, trust, belief, and hope in God.

She gladly abandons herself to God no matter the personal cost:

‘She unreservedly embraces the purpose of God, without regard to its cost to her personally. Her response is exemplary, demonstrating how all Israel ought to respond to God’s favor’ (Green, 92): ‘she says the words which have rung down the years as a model of the human response to God’s unexpected vocation’ (Wright, 12).

Luke paints Mary as a simple, humble believer who is thoughtful, open, obedient, trusting, worshipful, and faithful—BY THE GRACE OF GOD!

A Matter of Love, Doing the Otherwise Unthinkable
‘We aren’t talking about a pagan god intervening roughly and inappropriately in the affairs of mortals, but about the one who, as St Augustine said, made us for himself. When he takes the initiative, it is always a matter of love, love which will care for us and take us up into his saving purposes. Mary is, to that extent, the supreme example of what always happens when God is at work by grace through human beings. God’s power from outside, and the indwelling Spirit within, together result in things being done which would have been unthinkable any other way.’ (Wright, 11)

Luke’s narrative so far prompts us to ask: how will we respond? Like Zechariah or Mary? Of course, both are faithful in the long run! Will we take the long or short route?

This story is intentionally and inherently about far more than these few individuals: it is about all Israel at that time and subsequently about all people throughout time and whether they will be in ‘collusion’ with God or not: ‘the real needs here are not of Mary or even of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Israel is estranged from God, under alien rule, oppressed. God’s covenant with his people has not been realized fully. Hence, God is intervening in human history to bring forth an everlasting kingdom. In doing so, he solicits and embraces the partnership of Zechariah and Elizabeth, and Mary—themselves Israelites and representative in their own ways of the people of Israel.’ (Green, 84)


Works Cited:
Darrell Bock, Luke
Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke
Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone