CHAPTER 5
MARY’S FAITH
The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He 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, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.” “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.
—Luke 1:27–38
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!” And Mary said: “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name. . . . He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.”
—Luke 1:41–49, 54–55
Up to this point in the book we have been looking at what Christmas means. It means illumination and spiritual light from God; it means reconciliation and peace with God by grace; it means God taking on a human nature.
In short, we have been discussing the great things God gives us in Christmas. Now we should consider how to respond to what he gives, how we can receive it. It is also time to turn from the Matthew passages that tell us about Joseph’s role and to look at Mary, the mother of Jesus. Why does Luke tell us so much about how Mary responded to the incarnation? I believe it is largely to hold her up as a model of what responsive Christian faith looks like. What can we learn from her?
SHE RESPONDS THOUGHTFULLY
An angel appears to give Mary a message from God. I have often heard people say, “I am skeptical and ask a lot of questions. Religious people do not—they just believe.” No one, however, can accuse Mary here of anything like “blind faith.” She does not say, “How wonderful. An angel is speaking to me!” No, the text tells us, “Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be” (Luke 1:29). That word “wondered” is not a terribly good translation. The Greek word means “to make an audit.” It is an accounting word, and it means to be adding things up, weighing and pondering, to be intensely rational. Of course she is “troubled”—as any normal person would be by such an apparition. She is asking: “Am I really seeing an angel? Is this a hallucination? What is going on here?” She does not immediately accept the message but instead asks, “How can this be?” Mary shows us that responding in faith is a whole-person experience that includes the intellect.
Modern people tend to read ancient texts with an arrogant attitude, as if people in former times all had lower IQs than we do now. We assume that people back then were credulous, superstitious, and ready to believe absolutely any claim. But of course people were not less intelligent two thousand years ago, and Mary is responding much as you would respond if an angel showed up and started talking to you. You and I have been trained by our culture to not believe in the supernatural. As we saw earlier, as a Jewish woman, Mary had been trained by her culture to not believe that God could ever become a human being. So, though they are different, the barriers she faced against belief in the Christmas message were every bit as big as the barriers you may be facing. And yet a combination of evidence and experience shattered those barriers and she came to faith. That is exactly the way it works now. She doubted, she questioned, she used her reason, and she asked questions—just as we must today if we are going to have faith.
Readers of Luke 1 get another insight about this subject. Earlier in the chapter, an angel comes to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, and the angel says that even though Zechariah and his wife are old, they are going to have a son. Zechariah, however, is very doubtful. In response, the angel says that he will not be able to speak until his son John is born. However, when Mary expresses doubts, there is no hint of divine disapproval. What’s the difference?
What we see is that the Bible’s view of doubt is wonderfully nuanced. In many circles, skepticism and doubt are considered an absolute, unmitigated good. On the other hand, in a lot of conservative and traditional religious circles, any and all questioning or doubting is thought to be bad. If you are in a church youth group and you have questions about the Bible, the youth leader may bark at you, “You shouldn’t doubt! You have to have faith.”
What you have in the Bible is neither view. There is a kind of doubt that is the sign of a closed mind, and there is a kind of doubt that is the sign of an open mind. Some doubt seeks answers, and some doubt is a defense against the possibility of answers. There are people like Mary who are open to the truth and are willing to relinquish sovereignty over their lives if they can be shown that the truth is other than what they thought. And there are those like Zechariah who use doubts as a way of staying in control of their lives and keeping their minds closed. Which kind of doubt do you have?
SHE RESPONDS GRADUALLY
Mary’s faith happens in stages. Christian faith requires the commitment of our whole life. Yet few go from being uncommitted to being fully committed in a single stroke. What does the process look like? It can look very different for different people.
It is dangerous to standardize Christian experience. John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, spent nearly a year and a half in a state of great agony and depression before breaking through and receiving God’s grace and love. On the other hand, the first time the Philippian jailer heard the Gospel there was a flash of recognition, he accepted God fully, and he was baptized immediately (Acts 16:22–40). It is wrong to point to Bunyan and insist that true Christians can come to Christ only through a long season of wrestling, struggling, and agonizing. It is just as wrong to point to dramatic, sudden conversions such as the jailer’s and then ask, “Do you know the exact day and minute that you became a Christian?” I like that Mary is in the middle—neither like Bunyan nor like the jailer—and, therefore, she shows us that conversion and acceptance come at different speeds to different people. We can’t standardize when and how they should happen. And yet by looking at Mary’s process, we can learn much for our own journeys.
Her first reaction was measured incredulity. The first time she heard the Gospel message she said, “How will this be?” (Luke 1:34). That’s a polite way of saying, “This is totally crazy—impossible!” Unless you have heard the Christian message and at some point found it incredible too, I’m not sure you have ever really grasped it. I know there is a difference between children who have been raised in Christian faith and those without any such background. Christianity may have never been unfamiliar to you. But if you have never stood and looked at the Gospel and found it ridiculous, impossible, inconceivable, I don’t think you have really understood it. Mary finds this hard to believe. Nevertheless, her reaction is measured. She doesn’t stop the conversation. She asks for more information.
Her second stage is simple acceptance. She says, “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.” She is not saying, “It’s so clear now! I get it!” nor “I love this plan and I’m excited to be part of it.” She is saying, “It doesn’t all make sense to me, but I will pursue, I will follow.” This can be a very important space to occupy, at least for a time. Some people will make no move toward Jesus at all unless it all comes together for them—rationally, emotionally, and personally. For them it is either rapturous joy in God or nothing at all. But sometimes you can only do what Mary does—just submit and trust despite the fears and reservations. That gives you a foothold for moving forward.
Some years ago, I spoke to a woman who was coming to church regularly, though she hadn’t been brought up in Christianity, nor had she ever gone to a church before. When I asked her where she was regarding her faith, she answered something like this: “I used to think Christianity was ridiculous but I don’t now. In fact, it’s dawned on me that the alternatives are even less credible, and I don’t have any good reason to not embrace it. Yet I still don’t feel it and I’m scared of what it will mean. Still—here I am. I want this. I just don’t know how to receive it.” That’s how Mary went forward as well.
Finally, we see she eventually comes to exercising faith from the heart. It is only when Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, that it all comes together for her. Elizabeth, by the power of the Holy Spirit, perceives that Mary carries the messianic child (verses 41–45). The knowledge and insight of Elizabeth confirm what the angel said, and this gives Mary deeper assurance of faith. Now she bursts into praise that, she says, has enveloped her whole heart—“My soul glorifies . . . my spirit rejoices” (verses 46–47). She also connects all that is happening to her to the promises of the Bible over the centuries (verses 50–55). Now she is not merely submitting her will but giving her heart joyfully. In the end faith always moves beyond mental assent and duty and will involve the whole self—mind, will, and emotions.
Why does faith take this kind of time and follow so many different paths? It is because true faith is not something that you simply decide in yourself to exercise. It’s not a process of which you are in control. As we saw in the last chapter, we are deeply prejudiced against the idea that we are not in charge of our own lives. We are incapable, on our own, of simply believing in Jesus. Over the years, I have never met anyone who came to faith by simply deciding to develop faith and then carrying out their plan. No, God has to open our hearts and help us break through our prejudices and denials. One of the marks of real Christian faith, then, is a sense that there is some kind of power outside of you putting its finger on you, coming to you, and dealing with you. It shows you things you find incredible, helps you see that it is true, and then enables you to rejoice and give yourself. The One who made you at the beginning is making you again (Titus 3:4–7). Unless he comes and reveals himself to us, as he did to Mary, we would never be able to find him.
SHE RESPONDS IN WONDER
We have already mentioned that Mary sings, “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” (Luke 1:46–47). The soul and the spirit, in the Bible, are not two different things. She doesn’t mean, “The soul part of me was doing this and the spirit part was doing that.” What she means by the repetition, which is a typical Semitic literary device for making an emphatic point, is that she has been moved to the very depths of her being. Mary is not saying, “I think this could add value to my life” or “This is just what I need to reach my goals in life.” There’s nothing calculated about it. She is not weighing the costs and benefits and deciding to do something. She has been caught up wholly—her thinking is convinced, her feelings captivated, and her will gladly surrendered.
However, there is also a note of amazement at the fact that it has happened to her. She is looking down the corridors of time in this song, remembering the ancient promises to Abraham, and all the times God delivered his people in the past, and all his mighty deeds. And in the midst of it she realizes, “He has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. . . . The Mighty One has done great things for me” (verses 48–49, emphasis mine). God had spent centuries preparing for this day, and now he is going to save the world through a simple, poor, teenage, still-unwed girl. “For me.” There is a note of joy and astonishment that God is blessing and honoring her.
I would argue that despite the unique features of Mary’s situation, we should all be amazed that we are Christians, that the great God is working in us. In “O Little Town of Bethlehem” we sing, “O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray; cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.” It’s a bold image, but quite right. Every Christian is like Mary. Everyone who puts faith in Christ receives, by the Holy Spirit, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27, emphasis mine). We should be just as shocked that God would give us—with all our smallness and flaws—such a mighty gift. And so no Christian should ever be far from this astonishment that “I, I of all people, should be loved and embraced by his grace!”
I would go so far as to say that this perennial note of surprise is a mark of anyone who understands the essence of the Gospel. What is Christianity? If you think Christianity is mainly going to church, believing a certain creed, and living a certain kind of life, then there will be no note of wonder and surprise about the fact that you are a believer. If someone asks you, “Are you a Christian?” you will say, “Of course I am! It’s hard work but I’m doing it. Why do you ask?” Christianity is, in this view, something done by you—and so there’s no astonishment about being a Christian. However, if Christianity is something done for you, and to you, and in you, then there is a constant note of surprise and wonder. John Newton wrote the hymn:
Let us love and sing and wonder,
Let us praise the Savior’s name.
He has hushed the law’s loud thunder,
He has quenched Mount Sinai’s flame.
He has washed us with his blood
He has brought us nigh to God.1
See where the love and wonder comes from—because he has done all this and brought us to himself. He has done it. So if someone asks you if you are a Christian, you should not say, “Of course!” There should be no “of course-ness” about it. It would be more appropriate to say, “Yes, I am, and that’s a miracle. Me! A Christian! Who would have ever thought it? Yet he did it, and I’m his.”
SHE RESPONDS IN WILLING SURRENDER
Let’s return to Mary’s famous statement in Luke 1:38—“I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.” This is a statement of obedience with much to teach us.
First, this is not a blind obedience but one that is theologically grounded. This is not a simple knuckling under to a greater power. She does not say through gritted teeth, “You hold all the cards, God. I have no other choice.” When she says, “I am the Lord’s servant,” she is grounding her obedience in the reality that he is God, our Creator and Keeper, and so he deserves our service. We do not have the knowledge, the power, or the right to tell him what he must do.
Decades ago I heard a talk at a Christian conference center on turning our lives over to Christ and doing his will, not our own. Two questions were put to us. First, are you willing to obey anything the Bible clearly says to do, whether you like it or not? Second, are you willing to trust God in anything he sends into your life, whether you understand it or not? If you can’t answer these two questions in the affirmative, we were told, you may believe in Jesus in some general way, but you have never said to him, “I am the Lord’s servant.” Those questions were startling to me, but to this day I believe they are accurate indicators of what Christians are being asked for.
Another talk at that conference helped me do what I call the “theological grounding” for this kind of service to God. The woman who spoke said, “If the distance between the Earth and the sun—ninety-three million miles—was no more than the thickness of a sheet of paper, then the distance from the Earth to the nearest star would be a stack of papers seventy feet high; the diameter of the Milky Way would be a stack of paper over three hundred miles high. Keep in mind that there are more galaxies in the universe than we can number. There are more, it seems, than dust specks in the air or grains of sand on the seashores. Now, if Jesus Christ holds all this together with just a word of his power (Hebrews 1:3)—is he the kind of person you ask into your life to be your assistant?” That simple logic shattered my resistance to doing what Mary did. Yes, if he really is like that, how can I treat him as a consultant rather than as Supreme Lord?
Mary surrendered her will to God. Think for a moment all she was being asked for—because Mary, I’m sure, certainly did. Remember some cultural facts that we noted a couple of chapters ago when looking at the angel’s message to Joseph. She was about to have a child, and even if Joseph stayed with her, people were going to add it up—“Married that date, baby born on that date . . . Hey, wait!” She knew that in a traditional, paternalistic society, in a small town, she would always be seen as the bearer of an illegitimate child. The whole community would think she had either had sex with Joseph before they were married or had been unfaithful to her fiancé. She knew that Jesus would be seen as a bastard, yet she said, “I am the Lord’s servant.” She knew what she was getting into. “This may mean a life of disgrace—or worse. Whatever comes, I accept it.”
Mary connects God’s promise to Abraham with his promise to her (verse 55), and the comparison is apt. Consider what God’s promise to Abraham, and his faithful service to that promise, cost Abraham. God said to him, “I want to bring salvation into the world through you—through your body, through your family.” Abraham responded, “What, then, do you want me to do?” God answered, “Get out! Leave your homeland, your family, your friends. Leave everything you know, all your security. Go out into the wilderness.” “Where do you want me to go to?” wondered Abraham. “I will tell you later,” said God. And the book of Hebrews says: “And he went out, not knowing whither he went” (Hebrews 11:8, King James Version). It was exactly the same with Mary. Maybe, like so many other teenagers, she had dreamt of her future life. Maybe she had thought, I am going to marry Joseph, and we are going to have a house like this, and we are going to have so many children, and we will . . . But now God’s calling to her throws all that into doubt. Who knows what kind of life now awaits her? It doesn’t matter. When she says, “I am your servant,” she goes out not knowing whither she went.
Anybody who wants to become a Christian must basically do the same thing as Mary and Abraham before her. Becoming a Christian is not like signing up for a gym; it is not a “living well” program that will help you flourish and realize your potential. Christianity is not another vendor supplying spiritual services you engage as long as it meets your needs at a reasonable cost. Christian faith is not a negotiation but a surrender. It means to take your hands off your life. John Wesley’s “Covenant Prayer” expresses it well:
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine.
So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven.
Amen.2
HOW WE CAN FOLLOW IN HER FOOTSTEPS
The call to theologically grounded, willing, glad surrender is the most radically countercultural summons possible in the modern Western world that values personal autonomy over all things. Readers, therefore, might feel overwhelmed at this point. Maybe, we say, great heroes of the faith in the past, like Mary, had the spiritual resources for such a thing, but we do not. Don’t believe that. We actually have better resources than she did. There is a penultimate and an ultimate reason that we can follow her down this path.
The penultimate is to recognize that if we commit ourselves to God, we can trust that he is committed to us. Jesus once asked his disciples, “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead?” (Luke 11:11). He then reasoned that God is infinitely more generous than earthly fathers and will “give the Holy Spirit” to anyone who asks (Luke 11:13). This does not mean the Bible guarantees that life will go well for Christians—far from it. However, when disappointments and difficulties drive Christian believers more into the arms of God—to make him more and more their meaning, satisfaction, identity, and hope—they will find as time goes on that they are becoming far more grounded, resilient, happy, and wise. Paul writes:
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16–18)
In some mysterious way, troubles and suffering refine us like gold and turn us, inwardly and spiritually, into something beautiful and great.
Look at Mary herself. This girl, no more than fifteen, near the bottom of the social ladder, knew that if she surrendered to God she would go even lower. Yet she did so willingly, and went through the agony of watching her son be tortured and die young. Think of all the darkness she embraced when she said, “I am the Lord’s servant.” Yet look! Today most people in the world know who she is. Because she humbled herself and became a servant, she became one of the great people in history. This vividly illustrates that “those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12) and that “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25).
Mary is saying, “I’m only a poor, uneducated girl, and I will be a social outcast if you bring this child into my life. How is that supposed to save the world?” And the angel’s answer is, literally, “With God, nothing is impossible” (“No word from God will ever fail”) (Luke 1:37). History shows how right he was.
So surrender to him, and don’t underestimate what he can do in and through you, if you put yourself in his hands. As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians, if we give ourselves wholly to him, he will do great things even in our troubles. A Christian author relates this fable:
There is an old story of a king who went into the village streets to greet his subjects. A beggar sitting by the roadside eagerly held up his alms bowl, sure that the king would give handsomely. Instead the king asked the beggar to give him something. Taken aback, the beggar fished three grains of rice from his bowl and dropped them into the king’s outstretched hand. When at the end of the day the beggar poured out what he had received, he found to his astonishment three grains of pure gold in the bottom of his bowl. O, that I had given him all!3
One reason we can give ourselves to Jesus is because we have a better view than Mary had of the “eternal weight of glory” that is being achieved as we obey him. But this cannot be the ultimate reason we surrender to him. Our greatest motive for surrendering to him cannot be for what he will do in us. It must be to love him for what he did for us.
In the older translations Mary says, “Be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38, King James Version). Those are extremely close to the words her son would someday say: “Not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39). She made this surrender before knowing what Jesus was going to do for her. We know that for every sacrifice Mary made for him, Jesus made infinitely more for her. Mary accepted that she was going down in the world—but think of how far the Son of God came down, from heaven to earth. In that brutal shame-and-honor culture, she knew that she was accepting God’s will even at the risk of her life. But Jesus accepted God’s will knowing it would cost him everything.
When he was in the garden of Gethsemane, he said he didn’t want “the Cup,” he didn’t want the suffering. But he said, as it were, “Be it unto me according to thy word.” When he said that, he knew his obedience to the Father would mean a plunge into infinite, unfathomable darkness, unlike any that anyone had ever known. He went out not knowing whither he went. But oh, look at the infinite, endless redemption that came out of his obedience—an eternal weight of glory for us all.
Now do you see the better resources we have? Unlike Mary, we can read the vivid narratives, we can see Jesus being the Great Servant, surrendering his will, all for us. That enables us to say, “Lord, if you did this for me, then I can trust you and do this for you.” If she, a human being like all the rest of us, could do it without knowing yet about the cross, then we can do it too. Let us not fall lower in the test than Mary, this simple teenage girl. She points the way for us.