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THE CHRISTMAS MIRACLE, PART TWO:
TRY TO PICTURE ORDINARINESS

by Jack Hayford

WHAT KIND OF DAY WAS IT IN NAZARETH? And what was Mary doing when the angel appeared? Try to picture ordinariness instead of splendor or mystic radiance. A rainy day instead of sunshine. Winter instead of springtime.

Most of our poetic notions need to be challenged if we’re to be open to the Mary miracle. Why? Because if we clothe the original in lavish garment of imagined unnaturalness, we’ll suppose that supernatural happenings only come to superb settings. But God clothes Himself in the ordinary, coming to ordinary people, and He is no less able to do the extraordinary for having come to the world’s Nazareths.

It ought to be easy to shake off dreamy-eyed ideas about the setting of the Incarnation. Years later, a blunt-tongued disciple-to-be would hear of Jesus’ hometown origins and say, “Nazareth! What good can come from there?” (see John 1:46). And because God chose a most unlikely town to introduce the Mary miracle, we can probably count on everything else being improbable, too.

God Doesn’t Need a Setting

I was charmed by a magnificent staging I saw years ago, dramatically re-creating the angel’s announcement to Mary. She was singing in a garden, gorgeously attired in a pure white dress and sky-blue shawl. Birdsong filled the air, flowers bloomed in profusion and ivy dripped over the walls, providing an inviting scene that undoubtedly answered something akin to each viewer’s fairy-tail kind of supposition of exactly how it ought to have been. But Mary’s story isn’t a fairy tale!

And because God refused to give His Son a silver-spoon-in-the-mouth entrance into the world, there’s no reason for us to invent magnificence. It’s enough to have an astonishing promise offered and a miraculous conception occur. God doesn’t need a contrived setting to get Him into the mood for miracles. He simply sends His word of promise to ordinary people living in the most ordinary situations.
Let’s ask some unanswerable questions:

• Was Mary at prayer when the annunciation occurred, or perhaps washing dishes? Or scrubbing clothes?

• Was there a shaft of light upon her countenance, or a streak of perspiration?

• Was she at a quiet, convenient time in her day, or was this encounter an interruption?

• Was she poised, as though having read a script in advance, or just plain frightened by the angel’s sudden appearance?

Let’s keep asking:

• Had Mary’s parents taught her to believe “you could be the one”? Or had such a thought never occurred in her wildest imaginations?

• Was her family financially fixed, or was Mary’s betrothal to Joseph an economic relief for their strained budget?

• Was she beautiful, socially adept and personally desirable? Or was Mary possibly only a plain girl with a simple faith, raised in an ordinary home, scheduled for an arranged marriage and headed for a predictably uneventful future married to the town carpenter?

The Story Doesn’t Require Elegance

These questions aren’t meant to mount a crusade against tradition, but to force us into a confrontation with the truth. The truth is that nothing in the Bible required elegance in this part of the story. In fact, the tone of the text argues for Mary’s situation to have been among the lowliest. Listen to her sing several days later: “For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant;…He has…exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry” (Luke 1:48,52,53).

These are not the words of a fictionalized Grimm’s princess waiting to be discovered by her Prince Charming. Frankly, they sound more like the words of an ordinary, if not poor, girl, who has suddenly had the simplicity of her world invaded with majestic hope.
Let’s get it right. This baby will be born in a barn and shortly have to escape under the point of a vicious king’s sword, so we’re outright presumptuous if we think anything is going to come easy. And later, in this same town, He’ll be assailed by the hard-nosed thanklessness of skeptics dulled in faith by the wearying effect of the inane in their less-than-happy world. Yes, do get it right: Nazareth was no center of spiritual promise.

But the Promise came there.

And you and I are wise to take this to heart because it’s a too often overlooked fact, and it’s one of deep importance to us as we study the Mary miracle. There is an availability of almightiness—God’s. It’s waiting in the wings to come on stage where flies fill the air, where unpleasant smells annoy the senses and where end-of-the-line circumstances declare, “no hope.”

Hannah, the prophet Samuel’s mother, was another girl who was surprised by God’s miracle grace in an unlikely setting. Her words seem to harmonize with Mary’s: “My heart rejoiceth in the Lord, …He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes” (1 Sam. 2:1,8, KJV).

Hannah reminds us that dunghills (it can’t get more graphic than that!) don’t inhibit God’s dealings or limit our destinies. But they often are God’s starting place. And everything we can gather of popular opinion in Mary’s day is that Nazareth was one.

So, in that light, let none of us live without hope. Our loving God is as interested in incarnating His hope and promise where you live—right now—as He was when He sent the fountainhead promise to Nazareth twenty centuries ago. It’s important that such a conviction become fixed in our souls. For only thereby will we find it fully credible, and thus embraceable, that the Father of all promise is willing to father His fullest promise in the ordinariness of our own personal setting—however unpleasant, however unlikely.

We Don’t Have to be Sinless

And another thing: Concerning the girl from Nazareth, she was like you and me—she wasn’t sinless either.

It’s not comfortable for me to bluntly assert that because I respect the sincerity of those whose reverence for Mary is rooted in the proposition of her “immaculate conception.” Those two words frame a tradition that suggest Mary was somehow born miraculously herself; somehow kept forever sinless from birth, in a way that prevented her having inherited any sin in her own nature or person.

To deny this, as we must, isn’t to adopt an unkind spirit or to attack sensitive souls. I have nothing but the highest regard for this maid of Nazareth who became the mother of God. But in studying her accurately and biblically, I’m not required to scathe those who have created a structure of unnecessary tradition around her.

Still, to see Mary for all she does have to teach us, we must hold to the simple truth, distinguishing between it and some of the tradition’s unessential enhancements. Mary didn’t need to be a sinless human to become the bearer of the sinless Savior, and she wasn’t. I affirmed this because Mary herself, like every human being since the first pair, was of the fallen Adam’s seed. But the blessed truth is that this constituted no hindrance, for the Creator-Father is able to beget His untainted-by-the Fall Son within this woman’s womb without the help of an invented doctrine. How He did it—fusing deity and humanity—is His to achieve wondrously and our to accept worshipfully.

Uncluttered.

Unembellished.

Plain and simple. The same way all of God’s salvation processes work—without human invention, and beyond human understanding.

Mary’s humanness is essential to our fully appreciating her miracle. Only then can we see how determined God was to become incarnate as one of us, and to work a wonder to achieve it. But to see that wonder is also to see how committed He is to work beyond our helplessness; to move in upon us with His ability to redeem our hopelessness as well. In Mary, the same One who spoke into the chaotic disorder of the Genesis “void,” and brought light and life, spoke promise into the tainted humanness of her virgin womb and begot the Light of the world—bringing Life to all humankind.

Since that moment, the Light has kept increasing, and His Life has kept on multiplying in thousand of “wombs of circumstance” where other members of Adam’s race open themselves—first to Mary’s Son, and then to the patterns of possibility revealed in her miracle.

The Mary miracle first happened to an ordinary sinner in an ordinary town to set forth this lesson for all learners: Nothing is impossible where you live either—no matter who you are. Because salvation has come to save, this greatest of all miracles—once received—holds in it the seeds of any number of wonders.

The gift keeps on giving!

* * * * *

For Part One of this article, click here.

For Part Three of this article, click here.

For Part Four of this article, click here.

(This article is one in a four-part series we have posted on Children of Destiny's website. This material has been excerpted from The Christmas Miracle by Jack Hayford, © Copyright 1999, Regal Books, Ventura, CA 93003. Used by Permission.)

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