An Abnormal Response
"I am the Lord's servant," said Mary: "may it happen to me as you have said." And the angel left her. Luke 1:38, TEV.
Mary could have made many possible responses to her short conversation with the angel. A quite normal one would have been, "Do you think I'm nuts" Do you really expect me to go around with an obviously bulging stomach telling the legalistic people in my cramped community that the Holy Spirit made me pregnant?"
Here we need to get inside the skins of the Bible characters. It is all too easy to just read the story as something that happened to people who are essentially different from us. But that is wrong. It is unbiblical. We need to put ourselves into the story to get its true import. How would you feel if it happened to you or your daughter? What would be your response?
Philip Yancey asks, "How many times did Mary review the angel's words as she felt the Son of God kicking against the walls of her uterus? How many times did Joseph second-guess his own encounter with an angel--just a dream?--as he endured the hot shame of living among villagers who could plainly see the changing shape his fiancée?"
And Malcolm Muggeridge states that in our day, with its family-planning clinics that provide convenient ways to correct "mistakes" that disgrace the family, "It is, in point of fact, extremely improbable, under existing conditions, that Jesus would have been permitted to be born at all. Mary's pregnancy, in poor circumstances, and with the father unknown, would have been an obvious case for an abortion; and her talk of having conceived as a result of the intervention of the Holy Ghost would have pointed to the need for psychiatric treatment, and made the case for terminating her pregnancy even stronger. Thus our generation, needing a Savior more, perhaps, than any that has ever existed, would be too humane to allow one to be born."
These would have been normal responses. But we can be forever grateful that Mary by faith declared herself to be God's servant who was ready to suffer the consequences to serve her Lord.
And she set the pattern for all those who would accept her Son and live by faith in Him. They are abnormal from the ways of the world but normal in those of God. Like their Lord, they are different.
"I am the Lord's servant," said Mary: "may it happen to me as you have said." And the angel left her. Luke 1:38, TEV.
Mary could have made many possible responses to her short conversation with the angel. A quite normal one would have been, "Do you think I'm nuts" Do you really expect me to go around with an obviously bulging stomach telling the legalistic people in my cramped community that the Holy Spirit made me pregnant?"
Here we need to get inside the skins of the Bible characters. It is all too easy to just read the story as something that happened to people who are essentially different from us. But that is wrong. It is unbiblical. We need to put ourselves into the story to get its true import. How would you feel if it happened to you or your daughter? What would be your response?
Philip Yancey asks, "How many times did Mary review the angel's words as she felt the Son of God kicking against the walls of her uterus? How many times did Joseph second-guess his own encounter with an angel--just a dream?--as he endured the hot shame of living among villagers who could plainly see the changing shape his fiancée?"
And Malcolm Muggeridge states that in our day, with its family-planning clinics that provide convenient ways to correct "mistakes" that disgrace the family, "It is, in point of fact, extremely improbable, under existing conditions, that Jesus would have been permitted to be born at all. Mary's pregnancy, in poor circumstances, and with the father unknown, would have been an obvious case for an abortion; and her talk of having conceived as a result of the intervention of the Holy Ghost would have pointed to the need for psychiatric treatment, and made the case for terminating her pregnancy even stronger. Thus our generation, needing a Savior more, perhaps, than any that has ever existed, would be too humane to allow one to be born."
These would have been normal responses. But we can be forever grateful that Mary by faith declared herself to be God's servant who was ready to suffer the consequences to serve her Lord.
And she set the pattern for all those who would accept her Son and live by faith in Him. They are abnormal from the ways of the world but normal in those of God. Like their Lord, they are different.
RSS Feed
