Sermon Tone Analysis

“In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David.

And the virgin’s name was Mary.

And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!’

But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.

And the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God.

And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.

He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.

And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.’

“And Mary said to the angel, ‘How will this be, since I am a virgin?’”

[1]

Christmas art shows Jesus’ family—the Holy family—as peaceful and calm.

In multiple artistic renditions of the family of Joseph and Mary, the family is idealised.

In the paintings, a serene Mary receives the news of the Annunciation as a kind of benediction; but that is not at all how Luke tells the story.

Mary was “greatly troubled” and “afraid” at the angel’s appearance [LUKE 1:29].

The NEW LIVING TRANSLATION captures Mary’s stress by noting that she was “confused and disturbed.”

[2] I appreciate one recent rendering of this specific passage.

[Mary] “was thoroughly shaken, wondering what was behind a greeting like that.”

[3] When Gabriel delivered the lofty words about the Son of the Most High, whose kingdom will never end, Mary had only one thing on her mind: “I am a virgin!”

Contemporary feminists notwithstanding, an unmarried mother, especially if she is poor, is consigned to enduring a great trial.

The prospects for an unmarried mother today are less than exciting.

That young woman may expect a life of deprivation and hardship as she struggles to raise her child alone and without the complementing hand of a loving husband and a caring father.

No wonder the Jewish teenager Mary was “greatly troubled”—she faced the same prospects, even without any passionate acts proceeding!

Not so long ago, unwed mothers were ashamed when their sin was exposed.

I recall the response of families to the news that a daughter was pregnant during the days of my youth.

The young woman would be hurried out of town to keep her out of sight of prying eyes.

Shut up in a home for unwed mothers, she would give birth in secret, often surrendering the child for adoption without ever seeing the baby following the birth.

In modern North America, more than one million teenage girls get pregnant each year.

With hundreds of thousands of teenage girls getting pregnant out of wedlock each year in North America, Mary’s predicament has undoubtedly lost some of its force, but in a close knit Jewish community in the first century, the news that the angel delivered could not have been entirely welcome.

The law regarded a betrothed woman who became pregnant as an adulteress.

As an adulteress, she was subject to death by stoning.

Matthew tells that Joseph generously considered divorcing Mary instead of pressing charges, until an angel showed up to assuage his feelings of betrayal.

Luke tells how Mary hurried off to the one person who could possibly understand what she was going through, Elizabeth, her relative, who had miraculously become pregnant in old age following another angelic annunciation.

Elizabeth indeed believes Mary’s story and shares her joy, and yet the scene poignantly underscores the contrast between the two women.

The whole countryside is talking about the miracle of Elizabeth’s healed womb; meanwhile, Mary has to hide the shame of her own miracle.

A few months later, the birth of John the Baptist took place with great fanfare, complete with midwives, doting relatives, and the traditional village chorus celebrating the birth of a Jewish male.

Six months after that, Jesus was born far from home, with no midwife, no extended family, and no village chorus present.

A male head of household would have sufficed for the Roman census.

Did Joseph drag his pregnant wife along to Bethlehem in order to spare her the ignominy of childbirth in her home village?

C. S. Lewis has written about God’s plan: The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear.

It is a Jewish girl at her prayers.

Reading the evangelists’ accounts of Jesus’ birth, one may well tremble to think of the fate of the world resting on the responses of two rural teenagers.

Despite their portrayal in contemporary art and literature as twenty-something parents, Joseph and Mary were mere children.

Mary could not have been more than fourteen years of age, perhaps even as young as twelve; and Joseph could not have been more than nineteen.

How many times must Mary have gone over the angel’s words as she felt the Son of God kicking against the wall of her uterus?

How many times must Joseph have second-guessed his own encounter with an angel?

Was it just a dream?

What embarrassment must he have felt as he endured the hot shame of living among neighbours who could plainly see the changing shape of the woman he planned to marry?

We know nothing of Jesus’ grandparents.

What must they have felt?

Did they respond like so many parents of unmarried teenagers today, with an outburst of fury and moral lectures and then perhaps a period of sullen silence until at last the bright-eyed newborn arrives to melt the ice and arrange a fragile family truce?

Nine months of awkward explanations, the lingering scent of scandal—it seems almost as if God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for the entrance of His Son, as if to avoid any accusation of favouritism.

I am impressed that when the Son of God became a human being, He played by the rules … the harsh rules of a small town.

Small towns do not treat kindly young boys who grow up with questionable paternity.

Malcolm Muggeridge observed that in modern times, with family-planning clinics offering ways to correct “mistakes” that might disgrace a family name, it is, in point of fact, extremely improbable … 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 Saviour more, perhaps, than any that has ever existed, would be too human to allow one to be born.

Mary, whose family was not planned, had a different response.

She heard the angel out, pondered the enormous consequences, and replied, “I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” [LUKE 1:38].

Every work of God comes with two edges—great joy and great pain, and in her response, Mary embraced both.

[4]

Though Mary, a mere child, eventually accepted the angel’s announcement, it still remains that Mary at first doubted the Virgin Birth.

In fact, she was the first person to doubt the Virgin Birth.

Hers was not the haughty, arrogant attitude of disbelief displayed as a badge of honour, but a genuine questioning of the intent of the Father.

THE VIRGIN BIRTH IS DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE — When the angel first appeared to Mary he greeted her with the words, “Greetings, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!” Mary was rightly “troubled at the saying.”

Few of us have ever been addressed by an angel, much less been in the presence of an angel.

Had we experienced such an encounter, we would remember the encounter by the dread that overwhelmed us.

Doctor Luke says that Mary was in extreme confusion as result of the message that the angel delivered.

No doubt, she was confused because the greeting referred to her as highly favoured.

Obviously, it was the Lord Himself who favoured Mary.

Moreover, this young girl was informed that the Lord Himself was with her.

Whatever could such a greeting mean?

The greeting speaks of God’s sovereignty.

We dare not dictate to God whom He shall choose to fulfil His will.

Pastors are not called by a church, despite common sentiment and misuse of the term “call” in the vernacular; a pastor is divinely appointed and his appointment is acknowledged as the congregation accepts the mind of the Spirit.

We dare not demand of God how He shall gift us when we are saved; rather the Spirit of God “apportions to each one individually as He wills” [1 CORINTHIANS 12:11].

Harder still for many of us to accept is the fact that God chooses to save whom He wills.

“He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

In love he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved” [EPHESIANS 1:4-6].

If we accept God’s sovereignty in these particular areas of Christian life, accepting the fact that He chose Mary to bear the Son of God poses no great difficulty.

This young Jewish girl was assured that God had divinely chosen her and that the choosing was for reasons of His own.

By the angel’s greeting, God not only conveyed to Mary His sovereignty, but He stated quite frankly that His presence and His power was with her.

The teenager could not know what lay ahead, but God was even then comforting her with the promise that He was with her.

It is a remarkable fact that nowhere in the Word of God are we promised that we will be kept from difficulties in this age.

In fact, we are clearly warned: “in the world you will have tribulation” [JOHN 16:33].

At the conclusion of the first missionary journey, Paul revisited the nascent churches confirming the new saints with the comforting word that “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” [ACTS 14:22].

In the last letter he would write to Timothy, his protégé, the Apostle warned God’s redeemed that “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” [2 TIMOTHY 3:12].

These verses provide just a sampling of the negative warnings of trials and tests for the child of God.

Though God has not promised to keep us from trials, He has promised that He will be with us in the trials.

The last promise Jesus gave His disciples before ascending into the Glory was this: “I am with you always, to the end of the age” [MATTHEW 28:20].

Among the rich promises included in the Hebrews Letter is one assuring each Christian that God has said, “‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’

So we can confidently say,

‘The Lord is my helper;

I will not fear;

what can man do to me?’

[HEBREWS 13:5, 6].

The angel continued his announcement by informing Mary that she would shortly be pregnant, and after the normal course of time, she would bear a child.

The child that she would bring into the world was destined to be the Messiah.

That child Mary would carry was very Son of the Most High.

That child would receive the throne of His father David, and He would rule over the house of Jacob forever.

That child was appointed to reign over a never-ending kingdom.

All that the young girl had heard of Messiah—the expectation that He would deliver His people, the anticipation of the fulfilment of ancient prophecy—all came together in the angel’s announcement.

Mary would require the presence of the Lord because what she was about to experience would entail grave difficulties both for her and for her family.