Mary

This school year I am leading my youth group through the Gospel of Luke. It's been very exciting! Whenever we read a story from the Bible we try to understand it in light of the bigger story - the story of God fixing the good creation. So when we got to the encounter between the angel and Mary I couldn't wait to talk about it.

We talked about how Mary was a young Jewish girl living under fierce Roman oppression. We imagined what it would feel like to grow up hearing the stories of the one true God, who cared deeply for His people, and yet looking at the world around you it seemed like God was nowhere to be found. We imagined how it would feel to be told you were God's chosen people and yet when you look around you are slaves in the land that God had supposedly promised you all the way back in the time of Abraham. We imagined hearing the stories of God liberating His people from slavery in Egypt and yet seems to be doing nothing about His people being slaves to Rome. And to make things worse the Emperor, Caesar Augustus was making all these claims that he was the "king of salvation", "the son of god who brought peace", and the "savior of Rome" and God isn't doing anything about it.

We talked about Herod, the Jewish King whose allegiance was to Rome. He was a violent and murderous King and our records of him suggest that he had unbelievable wealth and the people under his rule probably lived with 80-90% taxation.

We talked about how the angel appeared to Zechariah (the religiously righteous priest) who didn't seem to get it, and then to Mary (the unwed teenage girl) who did seem to get it. The angel tells Mary that God has chosen her to give birth to a son who will be called Great and the kingdom of David will be given to him. To which Mary, appropriately responds with, "What!? How can I have a son if I've never even slept with a man?"

Then we got to this verse:

The angel answered, 

   The Holy Spirit will come upon you, 

      the power of the Highest hover over you; 

   Therefore, the child you bring to birth 

      will be called Holy, Son of God.

In this verse when the author, whom we will call Luke, says "the Holy Spirit will come upon you" and "the power of the Highest hover over you" he uses the same language that the Septuagint (the Greek translation of what we call the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible) uses to describe the spirit of God hovering over the waters all the way back in the creation account in the book of Genesis. For a person reading this who was familiar with the Septuagints creation account (Which we can presume is most if not all of Luke's original audience) this poetic symbolism would have been impossible to miss.

Luke is connecting what God is doing here in Luke 1 with what God did long before in Genesis 1. The God of creation, the one true God of Abraham and Moses, is once again doing something new! The same God who created an entire universe that is pregnant with possibilities is now creating something new within a literally pregnant young girl.

But here is where it gets really good!

Then the angel says, "Oh, by the way He will be called the Son of God". Which is a not to subtle way of saying that this means the 'Son of God' is not Caesar. It's almost like God is saying, "Caesar and Herod and the Romans may think that they are living large and in charge but this is My house!"