Ask for a sign from the LORD, your God;
let it be deep as the nether world, or high as the sky!
But Ahaz answered,
“I will not ask! I will not tempt the LORD!”
It wasn't out of piety that Ahaz refused to ask for a sign. He already had his own plans for alliance with foreign powers. He was too invested in his own ideas to be interested in what the Lord might have to say. And so God would instead wait for another who was not so preoccupied with her own plans that she could not hear him. To her the sign would be given.
Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign:
the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son,
and shall name him Emmanuel,
which means “God is with us!”
Mary did seem to have plans of a sort. She was betrothed to Joseph of the house of David, but in spite of this, when the angel told her she would bear a child she asked, "How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?" She most likely said this because she had already made the decision to live as a professed virgin, as several of the Church Fathers suggested. In such a case there would still be reason to marry Joseph as would be demonstrate by protecting and providing for his unusual family.
“Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.”
Mary was able to be so available to the angel's message because she wasn't overly preoccupied with herself or attached to her own vision of how she thought her life was meant to go in the way that Ahaz was. She had been and continued to be full of grace that allowed her to make a response with her entire heart and soul. Having been conceived immaculately and having cooperated with that grace throughout her life she did not experience the pull of disordered sinful tendencies acting like a gravity that pulled everything down into the orbit of the ego. This did not mean that such cooperation was always easy or without cost or even that she would always understand the how or why or what was asked of her.
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.
There was, in any case, no way for Mary to guess the way in which God's plan would be realized. That she was available for God when he asked in no way meant she assumed that he would choose her to be the tabernacle of his presence when he took on flesh in her womb or that she would be overshadowed by the Most High just as the cloud settled on the tent of meeting in the time of Moses. Mary knew there was nothing intrinsic about her that made her uniquely qualified apart from her election by God. And God could have done this same wonderful work in any creature as he so chose. So Mary had every reason to be surprised. It is no wonder it took some time for everything to sink in.
Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
May it be done to me according to your word.”
Then the angel departed from her.
In the end, however, where Ahaz said no, and where so many others said no in similar situations where they were invited to cooperate with the divine gift of grace, Mary said yes. It is this yes that we celebrate today since it was her fiat that unleashed every subsequent blessing of the Gospel upon the world. But this yes must not remain hers alone. We too, though sinners, though preoccupied with her own plans, must learn from her how to make ourselves available to God, how to make her fiat our own. The degree to which we do so is precisely the degree that Jesus will be born in us and become present in our lives.
Then I said, ‘As is written of me in the scroll,
behold, I come to do your will, O God.’”
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