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Sermon for the week of Advent 3
Isaiah 11:1-5 + Luke 1:39-56
Tonight we pick up the story, one last time before Christmas, of the events leading up to Jesus’ birth—as Mary herself probably recounted it to Luke, so that he could include it in his Gospel.
After Mary heard the angel’s announcement of her miraculous pregnancy, and after also hearing from the angel that her relative Elizabeth was now six months pregnant in her old age, Mary decided to make the journey from Nazareth down to Judea, to visit Elizabeth and surely to compare notes about what the angel had said.
As Mary arrived at Elizabeth’s house, she called out a greeting—maybe the same word the angel had spoken to her, Hail! Greetings! You remember how the angel had told Zacharias that his son would be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb? We see the evidence of that here, because as soon as Mary’s greeting reached John’s ears, even within his mother’s womb, he jumped for joy, because, by the Holy Spirit’s working, he knew he was in the presence of his God, growing in the womb of that woman who had just greeted his mother. As people rightly point out, the very first human being to recognize Jesus as Lord and Savior, apart from Mary herself, was an unborn child.
That wasn’t a wishful guess on Elizabeth’s part. Luke says that she herself was filled with the Holy Spirit at that moment, prompting her to call out to Mary with these inspired words: Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! But why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.
Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” calling Mary the “mother of my Lord.” Last week we talked about those who go way, way overboard in honoring (and, in fact, worshiping) Mary. We are not taught by the Christian Church to practice any kind of devotion to her, nor are we taught to pray to her, or to seek help from her. But we certainly don’t deny the words of Gabriel or the Spirit-inspired words that Elizabeth spoke to Mary. We rightly speak of Mary as being “blessed among women,” because God had given her a greater gift than He had given to other women. She was the only one in history whose womb gave human life to Him who is the Life. She was the mother of Elizabeth’s Lord, and hers, and ours. Her womb and her descended-from-King-David genes were the Holy Spirit’s raw material for crafting a human body and soul that was taken up into the Person of the Son of God, so that there is now one Christ who is both true God and true Man, God incarnate as a man, to save men from their sins. Mary was given a vital, intimate role in the incarnation of Emmanuel.
And both Elizabeth and her unborn son knew something else: that the incarnation of God’s Son was something to rejoice over. Why? Not for any earthly reason. Jesus wouldn’t make life on earth better for most, certainly not for John the Baptist, who would one day be put to death for his faithfulness to Christ. But now the Lord God was finally present, not as He is always present everywhere, but tangibly present in human flesh. Not “God-out-there-somewhere,” but God-right-here-in-the-midst of us, to dwell with us in our darkness, to reveal God to us, and most importantly of all, to carry our sorrows, to receive our stripes, to die our death, to make atonement for the sins of all men, and to grant eternal life to all who believe.
Finally, Elizabeth said to Mary, Blessed is she who believed, for there will be a fulfillment of those things which were told her from the Lord. Mary was blessed—fortunate, enviable—because when the Word of God came to her, she simply believed it. And in believing God’s Word, especially about something that was humanly impossible, Mary was walking in the footsteps of her forefather Abraham, who believed the Lord, against hope, that he and Sarah would have a son in their old age. Abraham believed the Lord and it was credited to him as righteousness. Mary believed the Lord, and she, too, was blessed, credited with righteousness, and held up as an example for all generations to follow.
Then we have the beautiful words of Mary, which the Church has echoed for millennia in the Magnificat. It begins: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant; For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed. For He who is mighty has done great things for me, And holy is His name. Mary’s worship—and ours, if it’s genuine—comes from the heart, or the soul, or the spirit (it’s hard to distinguish among such terms). Her worship magnifies, or “acknowledges or proclaims the greatness of” the Lord. Not of herself, but of the Lord. And she’s truly joyful that God has finally fulfilled His promise to send the Christ, her Savior, into the world, and that He chose to do it through her, a “nobody” in the world, who now, by God’s grace, has become, as Elizabeth called her, the mother of the Lord. And because God showed such mercy to her, she also knew that she would be called blessed, that is, remembered fondly by all generations, not because she deserves our honor, but because God had shown her favor, and so we recognize and give thanks for her.
Mary goes on to bless the Lord for how He treats the rest of His believers. And His mercy is on those who fear Him From generation to generation. Mercy, on those who fear Him, in every generation, from Adam and Eve to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to David, to Mary, to you and me, to our children and grandchildren…who fear Him, who listen to Him, who believe in Him, and who obey Him. It’s the same thing God said when He gave the Ten Commandments: For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. In one sense, God’s mercy extends to all men, in that He is moved by man’s wretchedness to help. But this mercy that Mary’s talking about is different. It’s is the special, personal, fatherly mercy for those whom God has brought to faith and who continue now in faith and the fear of God, who fear and revere, not just any god, but the God who sent His Son into the womb of the blessed virgin.
In this sense, God treats those who fear Him differently from how He treats those who don’t fear Him. Mary goes on to show the great contrast: He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones, And exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, And the rich He has sent away empty.
It’s very much like Jesus often said, whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. How has God “scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts”? How has He “put down the mighty and sent the rich away empty”? By telling them the truth: All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. You want to take pride in yourself? No human being has any reason to do that. God doesn’t let anyone trust in their own works, in their own strength, or in their own riches. God says to the proud, You will surely die in your sins, unless you repent and look to Me for mercy.
That mercy is not far away. God’s mercy entered the world in human form, in the person of Mary’s Son. So despair of yourselves and trust in Him. He has mercy on those who fear Him. He has exalted the lowly and the poor and the despised. He has filled the hungry with good things. As Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
And He does all this, as Mary confessed, out of faithfulness to His own promises—promises which He first made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—the fathers of the Israelite people—and to their seed forever. He promised those patriarchs that, through their Seed, all nations on earth would be blessed. That seed was Christ Himself, the Rod from the stem of Jesse, as Isaiah called Him, the Branch from Jesse’s roots, from the house of David, through David’s daughter Mary. This is the only reason why the nation of Israel has ever mattered in the world, that God, in His faithfulness, gave His Son into the world through that nation, according to His promises made to them long ago. Jesus is the fulfillment of all God’s promises to Israel.
Of course, the same Isaiah to whose prophecies Mary had been alluding in her Magnificat prophesied about how God’s kingdom would extend through the virgin’s Son far beyond the nation of Israel, how the Christ would be a light to lighten the Gentiles, for the creation of one great Church to fill the world, the New Israel that proclaims the God of the Old and New Testaments, the Church made up of sinners only, who recognize their need for mercy, and God’s merciful gift of the Savior who visited Elizabeth long ago, still in His mother’s womb, and in whose presence John the unborn child leapt for joy.
The same joy is for all the humble and lowly who look to Him for salvation. Learn that from Elizabeth’s words, and from Mary’s, and receive the same blessing that those lowly, blessed women received. Amen.
