Of all the scenes that the church uses in the Advent liturgy, these Lucan episodes would be best known to Christians. And certainly this is the annunciation par excellence, far more famous than the annunciations to Joseph and to Zechariah. This is the annunciation that has been taken up so frequently in theology, spirituality, art, and literature. Seeking necessarily to be selective amidst the wealth of material offered by these scenes, I have chosen as best fitting the Advent motif of this section the Lucan presentation of Mary as a model disciple in receiving and reacting to the Gospel message. In this emphasis, however, a caution is necessary. Some scholars, mostly Catholic, have wished to rename this scene the calling of Mary as if its primary message was about her. I reject that firmly: The primary message is centered on the conception of Jesus as Messiah and God’s Son and what he will accomplish by way of salvation for those who depend on God. Nevertheless, exhibiting true Christian instinct that the gospel is not good news unless there is someone to hear it, Luke presents Mary as the first to hear and accept it and then to proclaim it. Thus he holds her up as the first and model disciple.1 The vocation of the disciple is not the primary message of the scene, but a necessary corollary and one that well serves our Advent motif.
In discussing Mary’s discipleship we should be aware that we know very little about the psychology and personal feelings of the historical Mary;2 yet here Luke gives us our strongest NT evidence for the massively important fact that she was a disciple of Jesus. How important that is can be appreciated when we realize that one could not derive it from Mark. That Gospel clearly distinguishes between Mary (accompanied by Jesus’ brothers or male relatives) on the one hand and his disciples on the other hand, with only the latter placed in the context of doing the will of God (Mark 3:31-35). Mark has a deprecatory attitude toward Jesus’ family who think he is beside himself and do not honor him (3:21; 6:4). Even Matthew, who knows that Mary conceived Jesus through the Holy Spirit and so excises the deprecatory statements of Mark about the family, never clarifies that Mary became a disciple. Only John exhibits the same positive view as Luke on this question of specifically bringing Jesus’ mother into the family of disciples; for he describes Jesus as constituting her to be the mother of the disciple whom he loves (the model disciple) and thus gives her a shared preeminence in discipleship. Reflecting on the role of Mary as a preeminent disciple was probably a second-stage development in NT thought. After Christians had reflected on the mystery of Jesus, they turned to reflect on how he impinged on those who were close to him physically and then included that reflection in the “good news.”3
THE ANNUNCIATION
Following the same format he used to introduce the annunciation to Zechariah, Luke introduces this scene with notes on time, place, and the primary characters. The time (the sixth month, i.e., of Elizabeth’s pregnancy) helps to call the reader’s attention to the relationship between the two annunciations. For the previous annunciation, the place was Jerusalem and the heritage was priestly—circumstances befitting OT characters like Zechariah and Elizabeth. In this annunciation the place is Nazareth in Galilee and the heritage is Davidic—circumstances befitting Gospel characters like Mary and Joseph intimately involved with Jesus, whose public ministry will be in Galilee and who is the Messiah of the house of David.4
A close comparison of the introductions to the two Lucan annunciations reveals an even more significant difference between them. Zechariah and Elizabeth in their piety have been yearning for a child, so that the conception of the Baptist was in part God’s answer to Zechariah’s prayers (Luke 1:13); but Mary is a virgin who has not yet been intimate with her husband, so that what happens is not a response to her yearning but a surprise initiative by God that neither Mary nor Joseph could have anticipated. The Baptist’s conception, while a gift of God, involved an act of human intercourse. Mary’s conception involves a divine creative action without human intercourse; it is the work of the overshadowing Spirit, that same Spirit that hovered at the creation of the world when all was void (Gen 1:2; see p. 66 above). When one compares the Gabriel-Zechariah and Gabriel-Mary dialogues, there is a similarity of format, flowing from the set pattern of annunciations of birth that one can find in the OT accounts of the births of Ishmael, Isaac, and Samson,5 and that also appears in Matthew’s annunciation of Jesus’ birth. Nevertheless, despite similarities, throughout Luke underlines the uniqueness of Jesus who, even in conception and birth, is greater than the Baptist (Luke 3:16).
Worthy of note is Gabriel’s addressing Mary in 1:28 as “Favored One.” This has the connotation of being especially graced, whence the Latin translation that gave rise to the “full of grace.” The favor or grace that Mary “has found with God” (1:30) is explained in 1:31 in future terms: She will conceive and give birth to Jesus. The address “Favored One” anticipates that future favor with certitude, but it also corresponds to a status that Mary has already enjoyed. The one whom God has chosen for the conception of His Son is one who has already enjoyed His grace by the way she has lived. Her discipleship, as we shall see, comes into being when she says yes to God’s will about Jesus; but such readiness is possible for her because by God’s grace she has said yes to Him before. Thus Mary’s discipleship does not exhibit conversion but consistency. The same may be true for many of us at those unique moments when we are conscious of being invited to say yes to God’s will in something important.
The heart of the annunciation to Mary concerns the twofold identity of Jesus, the child to be conceived—an identity that was also central in Matthew’s annunciation to Joseph. The identity of the Messiah as the Son of David goes back in Jewish thought to 2 Samuel 7 where Nathan promises David that he will have an enduring line of descendants who will rule over Israel forever. Luke makes this explicit in 1:32-33 by having Gabriel quote that promise from 2 Samuel in a slightly rephrased manner (evidently customary at this time as we can see in the Dead Sea Scrolls). The following comparison of the wording shows this:
Luke 1:
32a “He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High.
32b And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David;
33a and he will be king over the house of Jacob forever,
33b and there will be no end to his kingdom.”
2 Samuel 7:
9 “I shall make for you a great name …
13 I shall establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
14 I shall be his father, and he will be my son …
16 And your house and your kingdom will be made sure forever.”
Mary’s questioning response (stereotypic of such annunciations), “How can this be?” and her insistence that she has not had relations with a man allow Gabriel to explain God’s role and thus highlight the other half of Jesus’ identity. He is not only Son of David, he is Son of God (1:35):
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you and power from the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy—Son of God.”
This is not the language of OT prophecy but of NT preaching. In chapter 5 of this book I noted how set elements of a description of Jesus as Son of God were reused in various parts of the NT in reference to different aspects of Jesus’ career (his parousia, resurrection, baptism, and now his conception) as part of the essential task of proclaiming who he was. The Pauline phraseology in Romans 1:3-4, which Paul knew from earlier preaching, is particularly close to Luke’s presentation of Jesus’ twofold identity in the annunciation:
“Born of the seed of David according to the flesh; designated Son of God in power according to the Holy Spirit.”
Thus, in revealing to Mary the identity of Jesus, Gabriel is speaking both the language of the OT prophets about the Son of David and the language of the NT preachers about the Son of God—language that Paul in Romans specifically calls “gospel.” Thus it is no exaggeration to say that for Luke Mary has heard the gospel of Jesus Christ, and indeed is the first one to have done so.
In all of this Luke has anticipated a christological terminology that is appropriate to Jesus’ ministry and beyond. He continues that anticipation in describing Mary’s basic response to the gospel she has heard. In the common tradition of Jesus’ ministry shared by the first three Gospels, Mary appears in only one scene (Mark 3:31-35; Matthew 12:46-50; Luke 8:19-21). That scene interprets the relationship of Jesus’ natural family to his disciples by having Jesus define family, not in terms of physical descent, but in terms of accepting his gospel about God: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mark 3:35) or, more pertinently, in the Lucan form, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21). When in the annunciation Luke reports Mary’s answer, “Let it be done to me according to your word,” he is describing not only one who is consenting to be the physical mother of Jesus but also and very importantly one who meets Jesus’ criterion for his family of disciples—indeed the first one.
Read in Advent, Luke’s message in this annunciation is as pertinent as when he first wrote it. We Christians must be very clear as to what we believe about the identity of the one to be born at Christmas. He is not just the Prince of Peace, the title that even noncommittal media commentators are willing to give him. He is the Messiah of the house of David, embodying in himself all that rich OT background that these Advent passages have evoked again and again. Beyond that he is the unique Son of God, the very presence of God with us. Anything less is not the gospel, and assent to anything less will not make us disciples. And assent to that double identity is not just an intellectual assent; it involves being willing to hear Jesus’ proclamation of God’s will and doing it.
THE VISITATION AND THE MAGNIFICAT
As part of the annunciation, Gabriel tells Mary (1:36-37), “Your relative Elizabeth, despite her old age, has also conceived a son; indeed, this is the sixth month for a woman who was deemed barren. Nothing said by God can be impossible.”6 That verse prepares for the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, which brings together the mothers affected by the two annunciations. Accordingly, when Luke tells us (1:39) that, after the angel departed, Mary arose and went hastily into the hill country of Judea to the house of Zechariah, he is not describing simply her eagerness to see her relative. Precisely because the angel spoke of Elizabeth’s pregnancy as part of the plan of God, Mary’s haste reflects her obedience to that plan.
Elizabeth’s prophetic greeting is of interest in Luke’s portrait of Mary’s discipleship. During the public ministry a woman in the crowd will shout out a blessing (macarism) in praise of Jesus: “Fortunate is the womb that bore you and the breasts you sucked” (11:27—a scene peculiar to Luke). This is a very Jewish blessing echoing the sentiment of Deuteronomy 28:1, 4 where a benediction was promised to Israel if it would be obedient to the voice of God: “Blessed be the fruit of your womb.” In saying to Mary, “Blessed are you among women7 and blessed is the fruit of your womb,” Elizabeth, like the woman in the crowd, is appreciating not only the joy of Mary’s being the mother of a son, but the enormous honor of being the physical mother of the Messiah. In the ministry, however, Jesus reacted to that praise with the same instinct that he showed in the scene concerning the relationship of discipleship to natural family (discussed above). He corrected the woman in the crowd, “Fortunate rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:28). Elizabeth is the mother of a prophet; and being filled with the Holy Spirit (1:41), she can supply her own modification. After blessing Mary’s physical motherhood, she goes on to say climactically, “Fortunate is she who believed that the Lord’s word to her would be fulfilled.” This reiterates the supreme importance of hearing the word of God and doing it, and anticipates Jesus’ own encomium of his mother (Luke 8:21). Mary is doubly blessed; she is the physical mother of the Messiah and one who meets the criterion for Jesus’ family of disciples. The fact that the mother of the Baptist utters this blessing with the babe literally jumping with joy in her womb (1:44) is an anticipation of the Baptist’s own witness to the one to come after him.
Thus far in the interchange between the two women during the visitation, Elizabeth has twice blessed Mary. Noblesse oblige would almost require that Mary in turn bless Elizabeth. But in Luke’s vision of the scene this is the appropriate moment to insert the Magnificat with the clear effect that if Elizabeth blesses Mary, “the mother of my Lord” (1:43), Mary now blesses the Lord himself. The preceding chapter discussed how the Lucan infancy canticles exhibit the style of the Jewish psalmody of this era in being mosaics of OT passages. That is true of the Magnificat in particular.
On page 81 above, we noted that the opening of the Magnificat is a deliberate parallel to the opening of Hannah’s canticle after the birth of her child in 1 Samuel 2:1-2. The Hannah parallelism continues throughout the Magnificat, e.g., Luke 1:48, “Because He has regarded the low estate of His handmaid,” echoes the prayer in 1 Samuel 1:11, “O Lord of Hosts, if you will look on the low estate of your handmaid.” This handmaid motif was anticipated by Luke in 1:38 where “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” was part of Mary’s final response to Gabriel. The term employed is literally the feminine form of “slave”; and besides the religious context of servants of the Lord (see Acts 2:18), it may reflect the sociological situation of many early Christians. When the Roman governor Pliny in the early second century went looking for Christians to find out what this strange group was, he turned to slavewomen because among such lowly creatures he was likely to find Christians. That Mary designates herself a handmaid is poetically beautiful in our hearing, but to outsiders in early times it would be another confirmation that Christianity was bizarre: a group consisting of many slaves, worshiping a crucified criminal. Whether or not the Magnificat came from an early Christian group of “Poor Ones” (see preceding chapter), it clearly shares their mentality. Mary has become the spokeswoman of their ideals.
That same mentality dominates the body of the Magnificat describing the salvific action of God (1:51-53):
“He has shown His strength with His arm;
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones and has exalted those of low degree.
He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty.”
This section continues the parallelism with Hannah’s hymn (1 Sam 2:7-8):
“The Lord makes poor and makes rich;
He reduces to lowliness and
He lifts up.
He lifts the needy from the earth;
and from the dung heap He raises up the poor
to seat them with the mighty,
making them inherit a throne of glory.”
Yet in the conciseness of its antitheses the Magnificat does more than echo Hannah and the OT; it anticipates the gospel message, especially the Beatitudes and Woes spoken by Jesus in Luke 6:20-26. I know that most readers are familiar with Matthew’s eight Beatitudes and the hallowed phrasing of “poor in spirit” and “hunger and thirst after justice.” But Luke has only four Beatitudes, and like sharp hammer blows they have no mollifying, spiritualizing clauses like “in spirit” or “after justice”:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.
Blessed are you when all hate you … your reward is great in heaven.”
And so that the reader will not miss that Jesus is talking about concrete poor, hungry, and suffering people, Luke follows this with four antithetical Woes uttered by Jesus:
“Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now, for you shall hunger.
Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”
The Magnificat, historically composed after Jesus had proclaimed such a gospel, reuses Jesus’ antithetical style to celebrate what God has done, exalting the low and the hungry, putting down the proud, the mighty, and the rich.
By placing this canticle on Mary’s lips, however, Luke has made a statement about discipleship and gospel. We have seen that in the annunciation Mary becomes the first disciple, indeed, the first Christian, by hearing the word, i.e., the good news of Jesus’ identity as Messiah and God’s Son, and by accepting it. In the visitation she hastens to share this gospel word with others, and now in the Magnificat we have her interpretation of that word, resembling the interpretation that her son had given it in the ministry. This sequence gives us an important insight on christology and its interpretation. At the beginning of the public ministry in Luke’s Gospel (as in the other Gospels) God’s voice identifies Jesus as His Beloved Son (3:22)—the good news from the start is christological. But when Jesus speaks the gospel to people, he does not reiterate his own identity to people, saying, “I am God’s Son.” Rather he interprets what the sending of the Son means, so that the Beatitudes and the Woes show both its salvific and judgmental results. In the infancy narrative Mary has heard from Gabriel the christological identity of Jesus; but when she gives voice interpreting what she has heard, she does not proclaim the greatness of the saving God because He has sent the Messiah, His Son. Rather, her praise of Him interprets the sending: He has shown strength, exalting the lowly, filling the hungry. In short (Luke 1:54-55):
“He has helped His servant Israel
in remembrance of His mercy,
as He spoke unto our fathers, to
Abraham and his posterity forever.”
The first Christian disciple exemplifies the essential task of discipleship. After hearing the word of God and accepting it, we must share it with others, not by simply repeating it but by interpreting so that they can see it truly as good news. As we look forward in Advent to the coming of Christ, let us ask ourselves how this year we are going to interpret for others what we believe happens at Christmas, so that they will be able to appreciate what the angel announced at the first Christmas (Luke 2:10-11). “I announce to you good news of a great joy which will be for the whole people: To you this day there is born in the city of David a savior who is Messiah and Lord.”
Let me close this chapter with the remarks of perhaps the most theologically perceptive and nuanced deceased pope of the last century, Paul VI, as contained in the last significant document he wrote on Mary (Marialis Cultus, February 1974). I cannot phrase better what the Bible tells us about Mary in the infancy narratives and elsewhere:
The Virgin Mary has always been proposed to the faithful by the church as an example to be imitated, not precisely in the type of life she led and much less for the sociocultural background in which she lived and which scarcely today exists anywhere. Rather she is held up as an example to the faithful for the way in which in her own particular life she fully and responsibly accepted the will of God, because she heard the word of God and acted on it, and because charity and the spirit of service were the driving force of her actions. She is worthy of imitation because she was the first and most perfect of Christ’s disciples.
1 It is worth noting that this is not a peculiarly Catholic view. It was clearly advocated by the Finnish Lutheran scholar, H. Räisänen; and it has been accepted from him by the ecumenical study Mary in the New Testament, ed. R. E. Brown, et al. (New York: Paulist, 1978).
2 See above in chapter 5 for some general remarks on historical problems.
3 Written earlier than Luke or John, Mark is very christologically focused and does not include in its scope this wider understanding of the gospel.
4 Interestingly, despite their very different annunciations of Jesus’ birth, Matthew and Luke agree on the status and situation of the parents: Joseph is of the house of David; Mary is a virgin; yet they are married—both use the less customary verb mnēsteuein to describe this marriage where the principals do not yet live together (note 2, p. 60). Luke pays less attention than Matthew, however, to how Jesus would have David lineage when Joseph did not beget him; see pp. 64–65.
5 Genesis 16:7-12; chapters 17–18; Judges 13:3-20. In the pattern the appearance of (an angel of) the Lord leads the visionary to fear or prostration. Then the heavenly messenger addresses the visionary, usually by name, sometimes with an added phrase pertinent to the visionary’s role, and urges, “Do not fear.” The message is that the future mother is or will be with child to whom she will give birth—a child who is to be named X (sometimes with an explanatory etymology) and whose accomplishments will be Y. The visionary poses an objection as to how this can be, sometimes asking for a sign. Some of these features, plus others pertinent to Luke’s annunciation, are found in angelic annunciations of vocation, e.g., of Moses in Exodus 3:2-12; of Gideon in Judges 6:12-23.
6 This last sentence is still another echo of the Abraham-Sarah story which is so prominent in Luke’s portrait of Zechariah-Elizabeth (Gen 18:14).
7 “This line of the blessing echoes a praise of distinguished women of Israel: Jael (Judg 5:24) and Judith (Jdt 13:18).