When Mary said Yes

Every Tuesday we have evening prayer and a discussion focused on next Sunday's gospel. As part of it, we take turns to prepare a short reflection on the biblical text. I'm not planning to share them all here, but this week I thought I might.

This week we reflect on Luke chapter 1 verses 26 to 38: the story of the annunciation. It is a passage which I love. Once you get past all the slightly kitsch images associated with it, I think it is rich and deep and beautiful.

Like many overly familiar passages, it is easy, I think, for some of both the promise and challenge of this encounter between Mary and God’s messenger to get lost, consigned to being a footnote in the Christmas story, an excuse for a blue-eyed, blond-haired angel with tinsel on their head to appear in the nativity play.

But it is so much more than that! And there are quite a number of things I could pick out to focus on. Including this: 

Gabriel’s arrival in and departure from the scene are mentioned, but I have often wondered how long this messenger of God stayed at Mary’s side. For me, this is much more than a mere irrelevant technicality: it speaks to the manner and means by which God communicates with humanity. I think we are usually tempted to assume that Gabriel stays for roughly the length of time it takes to read this biblical passage straight through, or, at a push, to sing the Angel Gabriel carol. It gets reduced to an instant and immediate encounter. Mary at home, God interjects with a message, which she hears, understands and accepts, and that’s it, done and dusted … and back to the dusting!

In understanding it thus, it can feel so alien to our own experiences of God, which, speaking for myself, are rarely so instantaneous, rarely accompanied by bright flashes of light and jolly bells ringing in the background. It becomes a beautiful story, but not one to which we easily relate.

But what if, then, the annunciation didn’t happen like that at all. What if the different phases of Mary’s reaction, and the different promises offered by the angel happened not over a couple of minutes, but say a couple of months.

What if Mary’s journey from fear, to total incomprehension, to eventual acceptance of God’s promise and finally to her commitment to serve happened not in the space of the few sentences to which it has been reduced but through days or weeks of gut-wrenching prayer and struggle.

What if, even, this Gabriel, whose name means “my strength is in God”, was not some otherworldly being but the whispered voice of her conscience inside her head; or a friend or neighbour who accompanied her through said struggles to understand how God was calling her to something both deeply human and at the same time extraordinary: inviting her to bring God’s presence into the midst of humanity.

What if, God is still sending messengers who stay for as long as they need to, and who we are more likely to hear if we dare to strip away the glorias and the medieval art. What if God is still calling us to things which invoke first fear, then total incomprehension, calling us in a whispered voice to make the same final step that Mary did … to acceptance and commitment: steps we are only able to take if we keep listening long enough to work through the fear and incomprehension first. Steps which lead us towards actions which may be both deeply human and at the same time extraordinary: inviting us too to bring God’s presence into the midst of humanity.

It may be heresy to say so, but I sometimes wonder how many people said no before Mary dared to say yes. How many others were offered this promise and did not hear it, or turned away from it … I can’t even say I blame them because I’m not convinced at all I haven’t done the same at times! Not in a “will you give birth to my son” way but in a “will you convey this promise of God’s presence to the world around you” way.

I still have so much more to say (but I know this is already more than long enough)! Much of it is about freedom and choice, about a call and promise which is never imposed, about possibilities of new life.

But perhaps much of the essence is already covered here. Because it all relates to this same idea: that in dressing this up as an ethereal encounter, focusing on how different it looks to our reality we lose the deep humanity of it, to which we can perhaps relate. In the church’s temptation to either dress Mary up as pure, perfect, and ‘holier than thou’ or reduce her to a walk-on part only really mentioned at Christmas, we lose her deep humanity, to which we can perhaps relate.

And in so doing we lose the challenge it demands of each of us. And is so doing we also lose the promise it offers to each of us. The challenge and the promise that the incarnation, as well as being a one-off, once-for-all-time historical event is also a reality in which we are each called to play our part: giving birth to God’s presence in the world.