December 20

According to Your Word

Some news still comes to the house in a person. An engagement, a death in the family, a job gone: somebody stands in the doorway and says it, using your name.

Luke opens this scene by writing down an address. He gives the region, the town, the woman, the man she was promised to and the family that man came from, and only then does anybody open their mouth. The messenger is Gabriel, and he has been sent from God, which puts him on somebody else's errand with somebody else's words to carry.

A great deal of Scripture has God keeping people who never knew his intentions, and what happens at Nazareth runs the other way. Someone goes to one woman in one town, and he speaks to her directly.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town in Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel came in and said to her, "Rejoice, you highly favoured one! The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women!" When she saw him she was greatly troubled at his words, and considered what kind of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, "Don't be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. You will conceive in your womb and give birth to a son, and you shall call his name Jesus."

Mary said, "I am the Lord's servant. Let it be to me according to your word." The angel left her.

Luke 1:26-31, 38

The messenger begins with Rejoice, and the trouble comes at the greeting, ahead of any mention of a son. Luke adds a question she turned over, and then goes straight back to the angel. That is all we get of what was going on in her.

Gabriel states it: she has found favour with God, she will conceive and bear a son, and she is to call him Jesus. There is no riddle in it. The child has his name before he has anything else.

She has the whole of what God is doing and no account of the cost to her. A message can be perfectly clear and still say nothing about the price of obeying it. Her reply is shaped by the announcement she has just heard. She calls herself the Lord's servant and asks for the angel's word to be done to her. She is agreeing to a sentence, the one Gabriel has just spoken. Then the angel leaves.

You may be standing where God has made his purpose plain while staying quiet about what it asks of you. That quiet is not evidence that you misheard him, and you have enough to answer with in what he has already said. Mary's answer is yours to make, agreement with what has been said before the rest of it can be seen. Let it be to you according to that word.

Lord, I am your servant. Where you have spoken, give me a plain yes, and let that yes stand when I cannot see the cost.