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.” (Luke 1.26-31)
In one of his books, all eight of them memorable, the writer and minister Robert Fulghum made this observation, writing, “When a nothing team full of nothing kids from a nothing town rises up with nothing to lose against some upmarket suburban outfit with new uniforms, and starts chuckling hail mary bombs from their own goal line, and their scrawny freshman tight end catches three in a row to win the game–well, it does your heart good.”
He’s right. It does do your heart good. And the passage from Luke’s gospel that we have before us today should do our heart good also, if for no other reason than it makes the same point that Fulghum makes. Granted, Luke isn’t talking about a football game, but he is nonetheless talking about a nothing kid from a nothing town rising up, and, making the original hail mary pass in a world where, more typically, only the big teams win. So, it should warm our hearts to see the opposite, at least once in a while.
Right at the start of his gospel, a part of which we hear today, the evangelist Luke sets the stage for the upheaval that will carry through for the remainder of his gospel. Here, a young girl of little consequence, possibly as young as fourteen, finds herself face-to-face with an angelic figure who tells her that she is blessed, another word for favored. As he informs her, “You have found favor with God.”
That she is confused is no wonder. After all, angels don’t pop out of the sky with regularity, so far as we know anyway, and they certainly weren’t a common sight in the town of Nazareth, a hamlet in the region of Galilee on the northern edge of Palestine. Had an angel appeared in the Temple in Jerusalem–as Luke some verses earlier tells us happened to the priest Zechariah–we wouldn’t be surprised. It could be expected, all things considered, since the Temple was the most sacred place in Judea and it held the holy of holies.
But Galilee, a backwoods region far from the big city of Jerusalem, the home to snuff-spitting sailors and an unholy hooligan or two? Big things just didn’t happen there, including angels paying a midday visit to a young girl who wasn’t known to anybody but the locals, and, even then, she wasn’t really any different from the other young girls that helped their moms around the hearths in the open courtyards of their homes.
Granted, it is difficult for us from our historical perch to see Mary as anything but extraordinary, being the beneficiaries of hagiographers who, through the subsequent ages, made sure we know her specialness. But, at the time, I assure you, she didn’t stand out. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, she was just another nothing kid from a nothing town.
And yet, as we hear today, an angel called Gabriel pays Mary a visit to tell her that she has found favor with God, going so far as to tell her that “the Lord is with you.” We’re told that Mary was “greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be,” since, after all, she knew she wasn’t anybody special, just another young girl in a no stoplight town called Nazareth doing her daily chores and trying to keep her mom happy.
Obviously, there is something important going on here and we don’t want to miss it, our tendency to superimpose on this young Mary all the glitter and glorification that came much later down the road stopping us from sizing up the shocking scene playing out in Nazareth on that day. And the important point we don’t want to miss is that the Most High God chose this person of little consequence–at least in the eyes of the world–to do something big for him.
He could have picked anybody–a member of a royal family, or the child of the high priest, or the debutante daughter of the richest man in Jerusalem–but, instead, he handpicked a homebody without a high school education to help him in his effort to turn the world upside down, the unlikeliest candidate on anybody’s list of potential helpmates for God.
But if we stay with Luke for the remainder of his text, we’re going to see the same thing happen again and again. Who are the first people to hear the good news of the birth of the Messiah? Shepherds who slept alongside their sheep and, as a result, their clothes stunk, men who were generally considered uncouth in their manners and in their language. And, for that matter, where does the newborn king of the Jews sleep on his first night in our world? In an animal trough stuffed with prickly stalks of hay.
So, here with the maiden called Mariam, Luke is simply setting the stage for the subsequent theme of his sacred text. This is the gospel for and about the nobodies of the world, a gospel where we will see the short-statured tax-collector Zacchaeus stand tall, where we will watch in wonder as the miracle worker restores the life of the only son of an unnamed widow in the village of Nain, about eight miles from Nazareth, and where we will hear the Crucified Lord promise paradise to a common criminal on the cross next to his own.
We’re in for a long list of surprises if we stay with Luke who will introduce to us the Son of the Most High God as the son of a carpenter of Nazareth who, when grown, will put aside his earthly father’s tools to build a new vision for the world according to his Heavenly Father’s plans. It is no wonder, then, that we will hear the young girl Mary, visiting her cousin Elizabeth, another unlikely person who upsets the rules of the world, say, “The Mighty One has done great things for me and holy is his name. His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him. He has shown might with his arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty.”
For this reason, scholars like to say that Luke’s gospel sets up the little people as the big heroes, upsetting the ways of the world and upending the tyranny of the titans. For anyone familiar with the Hebrew scriptures, it really isn’t anything new. These ancient texts continually present the all powerful God looking out for the people without power, beginning with a group of foreign slaves doing their drudgery and duty for the pharaoh of Egypt. Promising their release, the Most High God picks a man known for his limited verbal skills to confront the fearsome man on the throne, telling him that the Lord of the Heavens commanded him “to let my people go.”
That moment of release becomes pivotal for the enslaved people, henceforth called “the chosen people,” and it positions them as the protectors of all the little people in the world. As the Most High God commands them after their release from Egypt, “You shall not deprive the resident alien or the orphan of justice, nor take the clothing of a widow as pledge. For, remember, you were slaves in Egypt, and the Lord, your God, redeemed you from there; that is why I command you to do this.”
And should they try to cut corners on this command, he made it clear he was watching. He commanded, “When you reap the harvest in your field and overlook a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it, let it be for the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord, your God, may bless you in all your undertakings. When you knock down the fruit of your olive trees, you shall not go over the branches a second time; let what remains be for the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow. When you pick your grapes, you shall not go over the vineyard a second time; let what remains be for the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow. For remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt. That is why I command you to do this.”
Without a doubt, the Most High God was making it clear that he cared about the nobodies of the world and he expected his chosen people to be the first to extend that care to the least and the last, this collection of overlooked and underappreciated nobodies known as the “anawim,” a Hebrew word generally translated as “the poor ones.”
It was no big leap for Christian theologians in later centuries to place Mary in the company of these anawim, especially since Luke already had done so in his writing, as we see today with our own eyes. And that is what we want to remember as we look at this text. From a human resources point of view, which simply duplicates the world’s point of view, Mary had little or nothing to recommend her for a special position in God’s plans.
And yet, God chooses whomever God chooses and, if history is any indication, he often selects as his field agents the most unlikely and the most unnoticed, not the best and the brightest, but the least and the last, a preference that his Beloved Son preached, practiced and prescribed in his own missionary efforts on the face of the earth.
In fact, as the Christmas story makes clear to us, the Beloved Son became one of the anawim, born to peasant parents and raised as a manual laborer in Nazareth, a noplace town in a nowhere region of Judea, the nobodies there considered yokels and hillbillies. When he entered the public scene later in life, he was met with the putdown, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”
Well, the answer to that is, “Yes.” Something good can come from Nazareth. Luke tells us that Mary came from Nazareth and her son also would be called a Nazorean. All of which continues to confound the world and its holier-than-thou hierarchies, a tightly constructed LEGO creation that the Beloved Son would soon enough crash to the floor with the centerpiece of his discourses, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.”
The remarkable call of Mary that we hear told to us today should convince us, above anything else, that the ways of God are not the ways of the world. So, if we want to put ourselves on the side of God and not on the side of this world, then we should strive to be last, not first; and we should be sure to never look down on or step on the nobodies of the world because, in the end, they are favored by God.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 