Have you noticed that a growing trend in modernity seems to be the loss of nuance in language? We’re rightly concerned about the power of words and how words can be used in damaging ways, but we still struggle to make room for such caution and also retain the great variety of meaning that words can convey.
The beauty of language is that so much meaning lies in what is not evident on the surface. Sometimes that beauty is most palpable in what the words leave unsaid. And what is often unsaid must be supplied by our imaginations. This ambivalence in meaning should create a sense of humility, where we don’t claim to know more than we do. Unfortunately, this isn’t usually the case.
Take, for instance, a conditional “if” statement in English. If you put your foot on the brake while driving, the car will slow down. This is fairly straightforward, isn’t it? It’s a generally accepted fact that brakes cause cars to slow down. In the way this conditional statement is worded, there is little doubt about what will happen if you put your foot on the brake.
But let’s say that we change the words up a bit. If you put your foot on the brake while driving, the car would slow down. Now, we’re in a different territory altogether. It’s not at all certain that the driver will put her foot on the brake, and consequently, it’s not at all assured that the car will slow down.
And the nuance of meaning can be probed even further. We don’t know whether the statement is a slightly passive-aggressive, scolding injunction to drive slower: If you put your foot on the brake while driving, the car would slow down. Or if the speaker is simply stating something that is more impossible than possible because the driver has a penchant for going above the speed limit: If you put your foot on the brake while driving, the car would slow down.
Speech matters. Tone matters. Inflection matters. But unfortunately, we don’t have many of those rather musical details in Scripture. So, we’re often left wondering what something in the text means. And in that, maybe there’s a wonderful gift for us. What, then, do the angel Gabriel’s words suggest to Mary?
Gabriel tells her that many seemingly impossible things will happen. Mary will conceive in her womb and bear a son, whom she will name Jesus. And he will be great and be called the Son of the Most High. He will receive the throne of his father David and reign over the house of Jacob forever. And there will be no end to his kingdom.
This doesn’t seem evident at all to a young virgin, so Mary asks how. And Gabriel continues to elucidate. The Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of the Most High will overshadow her. Because of her favored status with God, so many things will happen to her.
It seems as if Gabriel states what will happen by the hand of God as if there is no question about it. But despite that assurance, there lingers in the midst of such confident speech that beautiful question of Our Lady: how? How shall this be, since I have no husband?
There’s so much about the how that we don’t know. Does Mary doubt that all this can happen? Does she have any say in the matter? Is the impossible possible? Will Gabriel’s words come true regardless of what Mary says? There’s so much we don’t know, and that is a beautiful thing.
For a moment, let’s imagine a Mary who’s not over-sentimentalized or meek to the point of having no agency. Let’s imagine a Mary whose body is not forcefully taken by God to accomplish his purposes. Let’s imagine a Mary who has free will like any other human, who doesn’t know how all this will happen, but who knows that it will happen if she assents. So, there’s only one way she can respond to the words spoken to her by the angel. Let it be to me according to your word. Because of who she knows God to be, this is her only response.
And here’s where so much of the world laughed, has laughed, and will continue to laugh. When the impossible is accepted as possible, the world laughs. It’s why Sarah laughed when she was told she would bear a son in her nineties. It’s why people in the crowd laughed at Jesus when he said the little girl he had healed was not dead but merely sleeping. It’s why even some Christians have laughed at the thought of a young virgin conceiving a son apart from knowing a man. It’s why people laughed at Jesus on the cross when he cried out for his Father. It’s why others laughed at an empty tomb. It’s why our own contemporaries laugh at the hope of achievable peace or merciful government policies or a Church that is still around in a hundred years. They laugh because they’ve equated understanding how something will transpire with its possibility. They laugh because they lack the grace of Mary.
But over and over again, we’ve heard and still hear and will hear what God has done, is doing, and will do. God has brought his people out of slavery into freedom by dividing a sea in two. God has brought his people home from captivity when they never thought they’d see Jerusalem again. God has given many barren women the gift of children, especially when others laughed at them. God has stuck with his stubborn people through thick and thin and even when they scoffed at him and complained. God has saved the world through the life and death of his only-begotten Son even though some laughed at his works. God has raised that very Son from the dead and made even an unreliable group of fallible humans his living Body on earth to accomplish his will in the world. Laugh if you will, but this is the God to whom Mary says yes. Let it be to me according to your word.
When the angel Gabriel tells Mary what God will do for her and the world, it sounds to us as if God is trying to bulldoze his way into Mary’s world and ours to save it. But when Gabriel says that God will and can do all that, the future nevertheless hangs on that final answer from the Blessed Virgin: let it be to me according to your word. It’s like a conditional statement that carries all the real possibility of being fulfilled if and only if, the gift of that possibility is accepted by the receiver. Yes. Let it be to me according to your word.
And this is where we are. We stand like Mary between two clauses of an unfinished sentence. God has told us what he will do. God has said that he will give peace to this world. God has said that he loves us unconditionally, and so no matter the worst we have done, if we turn to God, he will forgive us. God has said that everything he has made is very good, and that God will continue to love it as very good. God has said that all is not lost and that he will give us a glorious future. All this God has said he will do.
If and only if we ask not how God will do it but how we can be used by God in that prepared future, we will be a little closer to the posture of the Blessed Mother, who asked how and yet believed. She believed that she could bear the Son of God because God said she could. She believed that in spite of her questions, she would be the meeting place of heaven and earth where the lowly would be exalted and the hungry would be fed and the poor would have what they need and all who were laughed at for the sake of God’s kingdom would eventually rejoice.
For nothing is impossible with God. Indeed everything is possible, despite those who would rather laugh. God will do all that he has promised, but we must say yes. And aided by the prayers of the Blessed Mother and all who have said yes after her, we, too, can ask how and still say yes. Let it be to me according to your word.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 24, 2023