Fourth Sunday of Advent Luke 1:39-55 Micah 5:2-5a

Mary. You can’t get any closer to Christmas and the birth of her son, Jesus. It was a strange encounter, nine months earlier, when the Angel Gabriel announced his birth to Mary, an unknown virgin from a town in Galilee, and said that the child she was to bear would be God’s own Son, the Messiah, the promised Saviour of the world. Not just a bit unusual; totally different! When I am trying to imagine how she must have felt and what she might have thought in the days, weeks, months that followed, I know that I fail to comprehend completely what it must have been like for her. Society at the time did not look favourably on unmarried mothers; she risked even her life! But we can be sure here: God knew what he was doing and the man that Mary was engaged to be married to was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her publicly. Also, as we learn from Matthew’s Gospel, he was told in a dream to still take Mary as his wife, for the child that she carried was from the Holy Spirit. Mary might have tried to explain to him what was happening to her but it was so inexplicable that Joseph needed the reassurance of God himself. I find it helpful to know that God speaks to people in various ways, possibly the way they can deal with best.

And so we find Mary in today’s passage from Luke’s Gospel when she visits her relative Elizabeth, who is expecting a child herself, even though she had been ‘too old’, and beyond the age of childbearing. When Mary enters the house with a greeting, Elizabeth feels her own child leap in her womb for joy. And Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, it says, exclaims with a loud cry: ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’ Mary stayed with her about three months, possibly witnessing the birth of Elizabeth’s son John, before returning to her home. As we know from the rest of the story, she and Joseph go to Bethlehem, in order to be registered there.

Later still, after the birth of Jesus, when the Wise Men from the East are looking for him to pay him homage, the words from the prophet Micah are recalled with the reference to Bethlehem as the place where he is from. As we can deduct from all this, Mary travelled quite a bit, not even stopping in Bethlehem, but fleeing into Egypt, again inspired by a dream to Joseph, in order to preserve the life of baby Jesus from the hatred of king Herod.

Mary. We consider her to be special, yet she was such an ordinary girl, with ordinary hopes of her future: to be a carpenter’s wife, to raise an ordinary family perhaps, not God’s own Son! Whatever her hopes and dreams of her future might have been before the angel Gabriel announced her unusual pregnancy, she is ready to give them all up and commit to God’s plan and bear his Son, as her response indicates. But even more so, she goes to see Elizabeth and share with her the joy of God’s work in and through her. Her words in the Magnificat – Latin for the first word of Mary’s song – praise God for this and encourage people to this day. They are about hope and God’s holiness, his help and his care for the vulnerable. Mary was willing to be an instrument in God’s plan of grace and as Jesus’ mother was closest to him on earth. We can learn from her and we can be encouraged by her story that God’s love is able to reach into the most obscure and insignificant by the world’s standards, to reshape our future and offer us hope. The hope of Jesus, Son of God and son of Mary. Amen.