"Mary, Don't Be Afraid."

“Mary, don’t be afraid, you have found favor with God.”

It is nearly always scary to encounter the spiritual realm.  It places us in a position to be confronted by truth.  Truth reveals that we are very much not the biggest character in the drama we are living in.  In fact, we are usually seeing our place, position and role in the wrong way all together.  We have things sized and oriented around us according to deep seated misunderstanding.  It comes from making both too much and too little of ourselves.

It’s disorienting to realize all at once that my perception is horribly inaccurate.  And different kind of realization than the epiphany that comes gradually from preaching, study or meditation.

The entrance of the eternal God into the realm of the visible and limited is full of such encounters.  Preparation for man to be confronted by truth.

How tender for the messenger Gabriel to comfort Mary with his first words.  Remember, she was fourteen.  Granted, fourteen at .75 BC was different.  Culturally, her expectations were marriage and family.  But still, there is only so much you can be ready for after fourteen years of preparation.  And then she wakes up.  All at once seeing clearly that the scope of reality is shockingly more than she had understood.  

“Mary, don’t be afraid…”  Gabriel is a messenger from God.  He says what God tells him to say.  God is aware of the shock, the fear that is produced in the heart and mind of frail, blind humans when their eyes are opened.  He anticipates it and always cares gently for that person in that moment.  

I wake my daughter most mornings.  She is innocent beauty; peaceful, at rest, tucked securely into her bed in the safety of her room, in our home where things are familiar and predictable.  I kneel next to her bed, watch her sleep, listen to her breath.  I touch her hair and stroke her forehead.  I whisper in her ear, “Emma…” She stirs and her eyelashes flutter as she stretches and adjusts from sleep.  

In that few moments, she is reorienting.  Imagine if, instead of the familiarity of her dad, she wakes to a never before imagined messenger from her Father.  The realm of infinity had broken through into her room and was calling her by name.

There is good reason to be afraid.  To feel small and disoriented on a grand scale.  I suspect it was both an immediate reassurance and a terrifyingly unsettling exposure to be known like that.  She had know idea what came next.

And then, “you have found favor with God.”

What would that evoke, a sigh of relief or greater fear?  Was it like being picked for a special and dangerous mission, or a hug?  Probably both.  It’s like whispering in my daughters ear early in the morning as she is waking up.  I stroke her hair and tell her she is my favorite daughter and then say, “let’s have a good breakfast and then load our weapons and strap on our protective armor, we’re hunting rabid honey badgers today…”

I love this statement though, “you have found favor…”  It implies that she was looking.  She wanted favor with God.  She had been searching for it.  This was before the resurrection of Jesus, before the law of Moses was fulfilled.  She had worked to honor God, to obey him by following his commands.  She knew the history of her people and the humiliation of their predicament.  

What a greeting.

Later in the story of Jesus written by Matthew, he quotes Jesus, “seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then all these things will be given to you too.

But maybe Mary was a poet.  Maybe she noticed the favor of God in all the little things in her world.  She listened to the crickets after the sunset.  She held the baby John and touched his cheek.  She smiled at Joseph and felt blessed.  Maybe she was easily reassured by Gabriel because she practiced seeing and hearing the Kingdom of God.

That’s what I want to do.  To practice.  The entrance of Jesus into the world of the finite means that the infinite is now available to us.  Our reward is no longer just crops and fertility and worldly riches without oppression.  Our treasure is a relational connection with our Creator, Father, Groom, Shepherd, Healer, Sustainer, Provider and Friend.  We are no longer alone and left up to our own devices as Adam and Eve were after the apple.  Just like Mary, we’ve been invited and challenged to wake up and join in the adventure. 

“A work of art defines itself into being, when we awaken into it and by it, when we are moved, altered, stirred.  It feels as if we have done nothing, only given it a little time, a little space; some hairline-narrow crack opens in the self, and there it is.”

- Jane Hirshfield (poet)