Meditation 4 - Luke 1:26-38

The Birth of Jesus Foretold
26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a village in Galilee,
27 to a virgin named Mary. She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of King David.
28 Gabriel appeared to her and said, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!”
29 Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean.
30 “Don’t be afraid, Mary,” the angel told her, “for you have found favor with God!
31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus.
32 He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David.
33 And he will reign over Israel forever; his Kingdom will never end!”
34 Mary asked the angel, “But how can this happen? I am a virgin.”
35 The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God.
36 What’s more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she’s now in her sixth month.
37 For nothing is impossible with God.”
38 Mary responded, “I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.” And then the angel left her.


So I was thinking about the whole reason we're doing these meditation jouranls and everything. This week, as well as next weeks focus is supposed to be on the birth of Jesus. I've kind of been focusing on the Zechariah - fortelling of John the Baptist story. At least for my last post I thought think about the foretelling of Jesus.

(v. 26) Gabriel seems to be the angel of choice when it comes to telling people they're going to have a baby. Jesus and John the Baptist are 6 months a part. That means they were probably born on totally opposite seasons of the year. If you think about the summer and winter day lengths it's logical that in the winter the days are shorter. And if we go by the date of Christmas for Jesus' birth then we can assume John's birth was in the summer prior. Now Christmas is not a technical biblical date set up. They actually put Christmas on the date of largest pagan holiday. However if you think that John was born in Summer and Jesus therefore born in the Winter months then you start to realize that the days decrease in length, which sort of goes along with that whole "as I decrease, you must increase" thing.

(v. everything else) I can only imagine what's going through Mary's mind when Gabriel shows up and is like "you're going to give birth to the Messiah. I mean, this was like every woman's dream back then, right? Every Father and Mother wanted their baby to be the Messiah. A friend once told me that the name Mary means 'bitter'. Because when a woman became pregnant the Father became hopeful that this baby would be the Messiah. But when she had the baby and it was a girl the Father became upset and named her Mary 'bitter' because a woman could not be the messiah and Jesus was very much not a woman.

I love that all things are possible with God because I am so uncapable of doing most things.