The Day the Tide Turned
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The first Gospel story
If a non-believer were to begin his research into the Christian story with the Gospel of Luke, he might understandably complain that it takes Luke a while to get to Jesus. Luke doesn’t, in fact, begin with the narrative of Christ’s infancy. He doesn’t begin by talking about Jesus at all.
The first story he tells is of a man named Zechariah, a childless man, whose wife is too old at this point to allow for any hope of offspring. Then an angel comes and announces that their barrenness will be miraculously relieved: they are to have a son. Zechariah is skeptical of the message - he won’t hear what God has to say. So, God strikes him deaf and speechless to give him some time to think it over. Still, God is generous and not only gives him his voice back but gives him a son!
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John’s birth story is a very old kind of story.
It’s the story of humanity up to this point. It’s the pattern of the Old Testament, repeated again and again, with soul-crushing regularity. God takes the initiative of unexpected generosity, humanity responds with skepticism, faithlessness, disobedience, then suffering results from human resistance to God’s initiative. But God is still generous, and does good things in spite of our stubborn resistance.
So the story of John’s birth is the kind of story that readers of the previous books of the Bible have already seen. It’s an Old Testament story, where God’s instructions are either questioned or rejected, or at least not explicitly accepted. It’s the story of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses and the burning bush, of Gideon’s fleece, of Jonah’s flight.
God has to help us, has to heal us and raise us up, not only without much cooperation from us, but even against our opposition. John the Baptist’s story may be recorded in the New Testament, but he’s an Old Testament figure.
He is, as Jesus Himself says, the greatest of those born of woman, that is, of the Old Testament, the old story. His story forms a prelude, but only a prelude, to the story of the new Kingdom.[1]
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A New Story
But before finishing the story of John, Luke begins a new story.
At first it looks like yet another birth-announcement story. An angel tells a surprised young woman that she too is to miraculously become pregnant, but that God will make her pregnant directly, without a man’s help, and that the child will be the Son of God. Again, up until this point no one has ever responded to an angelic annunciation with explicit acceptance. What will this girl do? What will she say?
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The Fulness of Time
Let’s pause. If you asked the average Christian when was “the fullness of time,” what answers do you think you’d get? If asked to point to the fullness of time, the turning-point of human history, the great crisis, the pivotal moment, what event would people select? Would they identify it with the Cross or the Resurrection or the end of the world? Or when?
Well, we don’t need to guess. Scripture tells us. Galatians 4:4: “In the fullness of time, God sent his son, born of a woman.”
That’s right, the fullness of time is the Annunciation, it’s when God sent his son to be born of a woman, and when she accepted that mission. “Mary, the all-holy ever-virgin Mother of God, is the masterwork of the mission of the Son and the Spirit in the fullness of time… In her, the ‘wonders of God’ that the Spirit was to fulfill in Christ and the Church began to be manifested.”[2]
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The Right Answer
For the first time, the very first time in human history, someone responds with the right answer to God’s initiative. Up to this point every human being, whether due to personal sin or a wounded fallen condition, had deliberately or inadvertently thrown up obstacles to God’s plan.
Now, a solitary girl says, “Yes” “Let it be done unto me according to your word,” and the trajectory of salvation has begun. History has changed course. The tide has turned.
God always wanted our cooperation. He never wanted to fulfill the providential design by Himself. Of course, He is the primary Agent in all things, and the Annunciation is first and foremost about a divine Person, in the form of a man, who has come to save the world. But it’s also, in a secondary way, about a created person, in the form of a woman, cooperating in that salvific work. It’s about Mary, who willingly equipped that divine Person with his human nature, and so made Him the descendent of Adam and of Abraham, the Son of David and the Son of Man. Since his humanity was the instrument Christ used to save us, St. Irenaeus calls the woman who supplied Him with his human nature “the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race.”[3]
Yes, God always takes the initiative. God makes the first move in the redemption of the world. He has no need of our help, but He asks for it.
He asks us to cooperate in our own salvation, and in the salvation of others. He asks for our prayer, our sufferings, and our willingness to bring Christ to others – as He asked for Mary’s.
Mary’s enlistment in the project of saving the world becomes our challenge. The fullness of time has come, has come to the little house in Nazareth. And now God has taken the initiative with us, and we are, like Mary, asked to give our response.
Will you say “Yes”?
What are our areas of resistance?
[1] Cf. Matthew 11:11.
[2] CCC #721.
[3] Against the Heretics, III, 22.