There are three times angels counsel “Fear Not” in the Christmas story; they will be our focus today, next Tuesday and finally the Tuesday one day before Christmas Eve. We begin with Mary’s “Fear Not” because it’s chronologically first, and because this Sunday is the week we light the pink candle for Joy remembering Mary.
There’s a side of me that’s confident having an angel coming into one’s home should be pretty affirming. If for any reason, one’s not quite sure of one’s standing, “the Lord is with you” and “you have found favor with the Lord” are more direct and clearer than most of us get (even on our most attentive and faithful days). I mean, talk about individual Divine assurance.
But then… we get to the content of the message: It’s hard to look forward to hearing your whole life is going to be turned upside down and changed forever. “You will become pregant” – for some those words can be the unimaginable answer to many prayers, but for others, they are an unmitigated disaster, turning a woman’s life into a nightmare.
For Mary, getting pregnant was definitely the latter. First, there’s the practical question – “How in the world is that going to happen?” But then, I bet, a more threatening reality begins to sink in – not just the shame of an unmarried young girl in a traditional society ending up pregant. She risks the punishment of being stoned to death on her father’s doorstep.
Mary miraculously responds to God’s plan with an unequivocal “YES,” the text reports. So we (all the later generations) raise her willingness – obedience really – to the level of paragon. But that doesn’t mean she successfully tamps down her fear. The narrative might be deliberation in preventing us from fully imagining her struggle to heed the angel’s reassuring command, “Do not be afraid.” Or we simply notice, it needed to be said.
I once heard a preacher suggest Mary’s hurry towards her cousin Elizabeth in the Judean hill country right after her interchange with the angel was “classic fight-or-flight response,” an involuntarty physiological reaction humans (and other mammals) exhibit when threatened. Does Mary head for the hills driven forward by her encounter with the Divine. Or is she trying to out run her threatening new reality? It’s not hard to imagine Mary wanting to put some real distance between her father’s threshold and her now pregnant body! More than a sudden desire to make a family visit, maybe it’s just her survival instinct kicking in…
Think of all the people in our world on the run right now; literally and figuratively, desperate to get out of harm’s way. Seeking safety. Looking for where they can survive. People who have left home and family, lett all behind in hopes of finding some safe haven. Refugees in many ways and on different levels.
It sounds sort of Catholic, but maybe Mary is their guardian angel? Or that could be Gabriel? …And she’s just a companion on the same, desperate road…
Mother Mary and Angel Gabriel, come to us wherever we are (even in hiding or on the move), that we might not be afraid of all that threatens us, all we are on the run from.
In faith and courage,
Michael Caine
Michael is the Senior Pastor of the Old First Reformed United Church of Christ in Old City, Philadelphia.
Published by Renaldo McKenzie, Editor-in-chief of The Neoliberal
Get your copy of Neoliberalism at https://store.theneoliberal.com