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.
Mary can teach us how to respond well to God's plan, how to prepare and preserve a space for the incarnation of Jesus into our own lives and into our world. She began her own response with fear of the Lord, the beginning of of wisdom, appropriate to one who would be venerated as the seat of wisdom. This fear of the Lord caused her to avoid two extremes. One option which we often choose instead is a casualness whereby we take the gifts of God given to us for granted, without thankfulness, without awe, and without treasuring them. The other option, which, together with casualness, we tend to choose more than genuine fear of the Lord, is a self-centered fear that closes one in on oneself, that flees from the presence of the Lord as Adam and Eve once fled, and refuses to even consider the message. This fear isn't from humility before God, but rather distorted need for self-protection. That Mary did neither of these we can see be her posture of waiting and listening. She didn't rush to speak or rush to run the other way.
But Ahaz answered,
“I will not ask! I will not tempt the LORD!”
Ahaz attempted to mask his human fear as humility, but God did not find it to be so. God himself wanted to accomplish this work which would eventually take place in Mary. He himself desired to give the sign. It is a fearful thing to be on the receiving end of such a desire. Such fear is only meant to give rise to the appropriate attitude of response: awe, treasuring, thanksgiving. How much better it would have been if Ahaz would have allowed the Lord to work through him than to have to work around him. Nevertheless, there was no stopping this plan of God.
Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign:
the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and shall name him Emmanuel.
One problem we often encounter when God invites us to cooperate with his plans is that of doubt. We often don't really believe that his miraculous power extends so far as to impact us in our relationship with him. To be sure it marked the lives of the saints, might be happening somewhere in Africa, or even to those who knew Saint Solanus Casey, but never, we imagine, to us. Even Zechariah, a priest of God, had trouble with doubt when the things which used to be mere ritual suddenly became intensely real.
Then Zechariah said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.”
The question that Zechariah asked represented doubt. He asked for proof of how he could believe the message. His fear was a human fear that despaired to some degree of the power of God to accomplish his desires. It sounded similar to but was drastically different from the response of Mary to the Annunciation.
But Mary said to the angel,
“How can this be,
since I have no relations with a man?” (see Luke 1:18)
Mary did not ask how she could know it. She trusted in the words of God delivered by the angel. She asked, because without asking she could not understand, how the thing would come to pass. If she was to be involved, a how question asked in faith was more the merely valid, it was necessary.
And the angel said to her in reply,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.
Let us learn to respond to the invitations God gives to each of us as Mary responded to the Annunciation. Let us receive those invitations in holy and not in human fear. Let us not ask for proof, but let us not fail to ask for clarification in faith. We can come to understand as Mary did that, "nothing will be impossible for God". Because of it, we too can say, "May it be done to me according to your word."
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