Set this scene beside the one before it. Luke has just told us about Zechariah, and the parallels are hard to miss. An angel appears to a startled person with an impossible promise, and the person asks a question. Zechariah asked, "How shall I know this?" (Luke 1:18) and was struck silent. Mary asks, 34"How will this be, since I am a virgin?" and receives no rebuke. Gabriel answers her in full. Her first reaction was not calm either. She was 29"greatly troubled" and "tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be." Faith in this scene is thinking hard and staying in the conversation. The two questions sound alike and do different work. Zechariah asked for proof against a promise he doubted. Mary asks how a promise she has accepted will come to pass.
Gabriel's answer is 35"The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you." Luke uses that verb again at the Transfiguration, when a cloud "overshadowed" Peter, James, and John and the Father's voice came out of it (Luke 9:34). In both places the presence of God comes near and covers what it touches.
Then comes the sign. Mary's relative Elizabeth, 36"in her old age has also conceived a son," and she is six months along, the woman "who was called barren." After the sign, the sentence that carries the weight: 37"nothing will be impossible with God." It echoes Genesis 18:14, where the LORD asked Abraham whether anything is too hard for him, while Sarah laughed at her promised son. God has kept this kind of promise before. He is asking Mary to trust a God with a record.
Now Mary answers. 38"Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." The Greek word for servant, *doulē*, means a slave, and she chooses it for herself before anyone asks. She knows what it will cost: a pregnancy that a small town could count on its fingers, and a betrothal that could end in disgrace. She says yes anyway. Her Son will echo her decades later in a garden, "not my will, but yours, be done" (Luke 22:42). The mother's yes in Nazareth and the Son's yes in Gethsemane are the same surrender spoken twice.
Elizabeth names what made Mary's answer remarkable. 45"Blessed is she who believed," Elizabeth says, and the rest of her sentence names what Mary believed, that there would be a fulfillment of what the Lord had spoken to her. Mary believed before she could see it, and Elizabeth's own swelling body was the only evidence she had been given.
Where are you asking questions this week that are demands for proof in disguise? Honest questions are welcome in this passage, and Mary's was answered. What marks her out is where her asking ended, at "let it be to me," with no more certainty than she had been given.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a promise that has never been too hard for you, not for Sarah, not for Elizabeth, not for Mary. Forgive us for the times we let honest questions harden into demands for proof. Teach us to ask as Mary asked, and to end where she ended. Whatever you ask of us, however little we understand of how it will happen, let it be to us according to your word. In Jesus' name, amen.