Tuesday in the Fourth Week of Advent, December 20, 2022

Luke 1, 26-38

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.” But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his Kingdom there will be no end.”   But Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” And the angel said to her in reply, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.”  Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

All the essential doctrines concerning the Virgin Mary are found in these verses of the Gospel of St. Luke: her Immaculate Conception, her perpetual virginity, and her divine motherhood.  From these flow all that we understand about her, as her Assumption is the logical consequence of her Immaculate Conception.

“Hail, full of grace!”  The traditional translation follows the Vulgate translation of the Greek, which is oddly insufficient.  The Latin rendering was not that of Jerome, who corrected but did not create the much earlier Old Latin translation.  At any rate, the Greek participle the Latin translates means, rather, “You who have been graced [from the beginning]”.  The Greek perfect passive participle gives the meaning of an action completed in the past which has an effect in the present.  The Virgin Mary was perfected in grace at the beginning of her life, at the instant of her conception.  “Grace”, of course, is the divine life which God shares with us.  To be completed by grace means to be filled with God’s life, to be most holy.  This means that she was born without the effects of original sin and possessed in inner harmony of her emotions, intellect, and will that we cannot imagine.  We would be as the blind and her as the only one who could see, by comparison.

“The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin.”  This tells us that Mary was a Virgin at the time that she became with child by the Holy Spirit.  We might expect this since the translation also tells us that she was “betrothed” but not yet living with Joseph, but legally she was married to him and need not have been.  The information Luke gives us here is crucial to our understanding what to do with her statement, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” The verb tense is present, and in the Greek language, this means the present progressive: “since I am having no relations with man [ever].”  She intended, at the time of Gabriel’s visit, to maintain the virginity she had possessed from birth.  The fact that she intended to remain a Virgin even after marriage — in sharp contradiction to human custom — is also shown by her not accepting that the Child would be born in the normal course of her life with Joseph.  Her question to Gabriel makes sense only if she has no intention of forsaking her virginity.

As to the manner of the Child’s conception: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”  The Greek actually says that the Holy Spirit would “approach” her and the power of the Most High would “envelop” her, as in an embrace.  The conception will be of a miraculous nature, with God himself as the Father of this Child.  Gabriel adds, “Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”  This is a Hebrew idiom meaning, “He will be the Son of God.”  “To be called something” is “to be that thing”.  This is a very different understanding than that which we have in the West, just as a person’s name is their character or identity, along with their ancestry.  Thus, the significance of the name the Child will have: “You shall name him Jesus.”  That is, God saves.  Clearly, this demonstrates that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God, for the Son of God has no human Father, and so must be fully divine, taking his flesh from his human Mother.  And that Mary truly is his Mother and not merely a vessel through which the Son of God passed (which was an early heresy), the angel tells her that she is to name the Child — an action only the true mother could perform, with her husband, the child’s father.

All three of these teachings about Mary fly in the face of human experience, let alone the Jewish culture of her time.  They burst through human expectations and the limitations of the natural world, for “nothing will be impossible for God”.  You and I, poor frail mortals, are granted by the mercy of Almighty God the destiny of standing with the angelic hosts in heaven for all eternity beholding him.  This can be ours if we imitate what we can of the virtues of the Blessed Virgin, profit by her intercession, and believe with all our hearts that God can do this for us.