26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, a messenger of God named Gabriel came to Nazareth, a small town in the region of Galilee, 27 to meet an unmarried girl, betrothed to a man named Joseph, whose genealogy goes back to King David. The girl's name was Mary.

28 Entering her house, the messenger said to her, "Greetings, you whom the Lord has favored with his blessings, he is truly in your life." 29 Mary was disturbed by what she had just heard, and tried to understand what was happening to her. 30 The messenger intervened to say: "Mary, do not be afraid, for you have pleased God. 31 I tell you that you will be pregnant and will give birth to a son, to whom you will give the name Jesus. 32 He will become a great man and will eventually be called the Son of God, and the Lord will give him to reign in a manner similar to his ancestor David. 33 This kingship will first be exercised over the Jewish people, and will extend for ever."

34 Then Mary replied to the messenger, "Explain to me how I shall do this, since I do not at present have sexual relations with a husband." 35 The messenger replied: "God's strength and power will intervene in your life, so that the child you give birth to will be regarded as God's work, as his son. 36 As a sign of God's power, know that Elizabeth, your relative, is in her sixth month of pregnancy, she who is old and was considered barren. 37 You see that God keeps his promises and nothing is impossible to him". 38 Then Mary replied: "I submit myself totally to the will of the Lord, I accept everything you have just told me".

And so the messenger left her.

Where can we find a little hope?

When I get up in the morning, I usually glance at the day's headlines. Today, I learn first: Fifty-one people, including a child, were killed on Thursday by a Russian strike in Groza, a small village in eastern Ukraine, on the sidelines of a funeral. Then, a little further on: More than 100 people are missing in northeast India after heavy rains caused a glacial lake to burst, resulting in flash floods that ravaged the Himalayan state of Sikkim. But there's more bad news to come, as I'm also informed that over 100,000 Armenians have fled Nagorno-Karabakh as a result of Azerbaijan's ethnic cleansing victory. I'd like to stop reading the day's news, but then a sentence catches my attention: 2023 is now the hottest year ever measured over the first nine months, approaching an anomaly of 2.7°F compared to the pre-industrial era. But where does the bad news end? And later in the day, I learn that Israel has declared war on Hamas.

How can I want to get up and start my day when there's so much bad news? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? So I thought I'd read today's gospel to see if we couldn't find a little light, a reason to hope and keep moving forward.

This piece of gospel is written by Luke and is known as the Annunciation to Mary. The story's main points are well known: the angel Gabriel comes to a young girl in Nazareth to announce that she will be the mother of a son, a future king, and tells her what name to give him. The young girl, frightened by such an interlocutor from heaven, wondered how this could be, since she was not yet living with her fiancé, Joseph. The angel replies that God's power will see to that, and as a sign of this power, he announces that Elizabeth, an elderly woman and relative, is expecting her first child. The story ends with the young woman's consent to be the mother of this future king.

To read this story properly, we need to get into the perspective of its author, Luke. First of all, let's not assume that Luke went to consult Mary to obtain details about her life (Mary had probably been dead for several decades when Luke wrote his gospel around the year 85), but he uses the same structure as for the annunciation of important people, first developed in the Old Testament for the births of Ishmael (Gn 16), Isaac (Gn 17) and Samson (Jg 13), and now used for the births of John the Baptist and Jesus, and the structure always follow these steps: 1) the appearance of an angel, God's messenger; 2) fear before this intervention; 3) the divine message; 4) the visionary's objection; 5) the gift of a sign to reassure the visionary (on the subject see R. E. Brown).

So what is Luke's intention? To grasp his thinking, we must first consider the character of Mary. Let's not forget that the New Testament in general, and Luke in particular, knows virtually nothing about her other than that she was Jesus' mother. According to the matrimonial practices of the time, we can guess that she was around twelve years old, and marriage was a matter of contract between two families, and took place in two stages: first what we call the "betrothal", but which had the same value among the Jews as today's formal marriage, then cohabitation, about a year later when the bride joined the groom at home. So here we have a young girl who is already bound to a man, but before the cohabitation begins. Now, for Luke, this young girl is the typical figure of the "poor of Yahweh", those Jewish Christians, some of whom were physically poor, but whose term was broadened to include those who no longer put their trust in their own strength, but in God's: the humble, the poor, the sick, the afflicted, the widows and the orphans. And indeed, the various hymns that Luke puts into the mouths of the different characters in his infancy narrative would most likely have come from the prayers of these groups. For Luke, Mary is the typical figure of these "poor of Yahweh", and thus the figure of the true Christian.

Three words give us the key to understanding Luke's account. First, there is the word "power" of the Most High, a power that has already been exercised in the fecundity of Elizabeth and will be exercised in the fecundity of Mary. Then there's the expression "you will conceive a son": Mary is not being asked to go on a mission to the other side of the world, but simply to play her role as mother. Finally, there's the expression " I submit myself totally to the will of the Lord (I am the servant of the Lord)", which denotes agreement to an unusual event, being pregnant even before cohabitation and the prospect of a child-king, but for Luke's listener, who knows the whole story of Jesus, it's agreement to a life of upheaval that will end with the execution of her child.

This story sums up Luke's theology. For him, there is a force at work in our world, which he calls the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit, who guided Jesus and John the Baptist throughout their lives, who manifested himself at Pentecost by giving a universal dynamism or openness to believers, and who will be at work until the end of time. But this power can only be exercised through us. It was exercised through that little twelve-year-old girl Mary, and it was exercised through the carpenter Jesus, and it continues to be exercised through each and every one of us. But to exercise itself through human beings, it needs their consent. Let's not imagine for us a scene like the Annunciation, where a supernatural being speaks directly to us. No. Every day, it's the very events of our lives that implicitly tell us: do you accept me or do you reject me? In some cases, it's very easy to answer. In other cases, it's very difficult.

How can all this shed light on all those bad news mentioned at the beginning, and give us reasons for hope? The first thing is to take seriously Luke's insistence on God's strength and dynamism in the world. If we don't believe this, we're bound to feel lonely and hopeless. Some will say: "But we don't see any signs of hope". But that's the very definition of faith: being able to move forward in the dark towards a sun we can't yet see. That's why faith is fundamental: knowing that we're not alone keeps us going. But there's a second thing the Annunciation story teaches us: what's asked of us for the salvation of the world is very simple: to live to the end what we have to live, despite all the obstacles. Mary was asked simply to be a mother, outside the norms of cohabitation with a husband. What impact does this have on the salvation of the world? Even if the visible impact came from her son, her role was fundamental, so much so that she was given the title of "co-redemptrix". Through our lives, we may feel we're only influencing a spouse, children, in-laws, neighbors, friends or colleagues. But these people also influence others, political figures, people of power. The true impact of a life is invisible, but it is fundamental.

The world of the future will belong to the believers, whatever their religion, who have kept going in the dark because they know they are not alone. Because they have believed, they have created the basis for others to make real changes and start a new world, like a child no longer expected.

 

-André Gilbert, Gatineau, October 2023