26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
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Why did God choose Mary? There has been a strong tendency in church history, and still present today, to conclude that there must have been something in Mary that prompted God’s choice. The Lord must have looked over all the young women in the Middle East, and determined that she was the most worthy of them all. After all, we had just heard about the choice of Zechariah and Elizabeth, and Luke had pointed out how righteous they were.
But there is no mention of Mary’s righteousness and blamelessness. All we know of her is that she is a virgin, which would imply that she was young, probably mid-teen years, and that she lived in a little backward town in the region of Galilee.
But to me it looks like this is not a case of God picking out the most worthy young woman to be the mother of the Messiah. Rather, it looks like He is selecting the most unlikely, lowliest, and surprising. Rather than being similar to the announcement to Zechariah and Elizabeth, what is striking here how in almost every way it is the opposite.
Instead of taking place in the temple, the call comes in this remote village in the most extreme region of Israel. Instead of the call coming to a priest performing his duties, it comes to a young woman, about whose faith we know nothing. Instead of the call coming to a couple past child-bearing year, the call comes to a young woman before her child-bearing years.
We’re so used to the selection of Mary that we can lose sight of how shocking it is. We might have expected that the call would come to a woman in the high priest’s family, or perhaps even Herod’s household. But a Galilean?
So what are we to conclude? What do we draw from this? The key point is what Gabriel says to Mary, that she is “highly favored.” In other words: Grace. The point of the selection of Mary is that she didn’t deserve this. She had done nothing to merit this selection. We have no reason from the text to believe that she was sinless, that she was more righteous than her peers, that she was anything but an ordinary young woman.
And that is the point. It’s not about her. It’s about God’s grace.
You and me have not been chosen by God for this particular task. But we have been chosen by Him to receive the greatest blessing. We are “highly favored” by God and so receive the fruits of the work of the Son of Mary. We haven’t earned it. We don’t deserve it. There is nothing in us that merits this outpouring of God’s grace, His “highly favored” pronouncement.
This is what we are to take away from the selection of Mary. Not marveling at how holy she must have been, but rather at how gracious God is.
Heavenly Father, I praise you for your grace, that you have declared that I am “highly favored” by You, because of Jesus Christ.
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