Saturday, July 7, 2018

The Annunciation

"No woman has ever taken a pregnancy test without saying a prayer—one way or the other." One warm Friday in June, in the village of Nazareth while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a fellow pastor made this remark about the anxiety that comes from waiting for pee-stick test results. 

Remnants of a cave under the Basilica of the Annunciation
We were walking between the two churches in Nazareth that commemorate the Annunciation—that moment when the angel Gabriel revealed to Mary that she would bear a son out of wedlock. The first is the Church of St. Gabriel, a site run by the Greek Orthodox which is built over the only spring in the town of Nazareth. The Orthodox faithful believe that the angel came to Mary while she was drawing water, and so they built a church there to mark this event. The second site is the Basilica of the Annunciation, maintained by the Roman Catholic Church, built over caves that residents of Nazareth used to inhabit. One of those caves may or may not have been Mary's actual home, but she almost certainly lived in a place very similar.

This angelic birth announcement from Luke 1 is one of my favorite passages in the Bible, and I've read it as least every Advent season for the past 40 years. Yet when I entered the sanctuary of that second church, after hearing my friend's reminder about the anxiety that comes with any potential pregnancy, I carried a new understanding of how troubling that moment was for Mary.

Stained glass window in the Basilica
If you read Luke's account closely, you will see that Mary's initial response was not one of passive acceptance. I wonder if our English translations downplay her emotional response by saying that she was "much perplexed" (1:29). Her first words of response to this news are: "How can this be?" (1:34). No one asks Mary if she wants to carry this burden, risking life and reputation to bear a son she didn't plan. Instead, she is given a promise: "The Lord is with you" (1:28).

We often pray for God to fix things, to get us out of jams by making our difficulties go away. But God's ways of resolving our difficulties—that is, how God heals and reconciles—are different than our ideas about fixing. To fix something means that the problem is removed. But God usually heals instead, and healing still involves the initial pain and memory of the accompanying difficulty. Consider how Jesus's resurrected body still bears the scars of his torture and crucifixion. (See John 20:24-29) Mary still had to bear the risk and shame of carrying a child who was conceived before she was properly married. Thank God that she didn't try to "fix" the problem of her pregnancy.

Everything that God touches in creation is troubledfallen and corrupted by sin. If God were to deal with us by "fixing" everything, then there would be no choice but to dissolve us and make us go away, wiping out all evidence of the mess. But God is greater than that, and God's power is such that it is possible for God's holiness to heal us without wiping us out. In Jesus—both in his birth and his death—we see that God's mighty power to heal means that good can come from trouble. Praise God that none of us have been "fixed."

The well at the bottom of the Church of St. Gabriel

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