of condemnation. See, the price of our salvation is offered to you; if you consent, we shall at once be delivered. By the Eternal Word of God we were all created, and behold we die. By your short answer we shall be refreshed and recalled to life. Adam, with all his race Adam, a weeping exile from Paradise, implores it of you. . . . Hasten, then, O Lady, to give your answer; hasten to speak.52
Here is the icon of faith and grace. Gabriel announces but does not compel. God invites but does not force. We cannot say that Mary acted independently of God’s Spirit. No, her pregnancy was dependent upon the work of God within her, but her response was her own. Gabriel awaits her Yes. Mary conceived the Word by faith in her heart before she conceived in her womb.53 God’s relationship with all of us is on display in the annunciation. As creatures, it is true, we depend upon a Creator; as children of the promise we depend upon a Father; as redeemed sinners we depend upon a Redeemer. So, in an important sense, we are never independent of God our Creator, Father, Redeemer, and Life-Giver. Nevertheless, the mystery of God’s good grace is that our lives and our actions are our own. God respects the dignity of our existence.
We return to the scene. For a brief but eternal moment, all of history holds its breath for Mary’s answer. Of course, the Almighty and Everlasting One could do the work of salvation without Mary. For that matter, God could do whatever God wants without any of us, but this is not God’s choice. Instead, God relies upon the unreliable and depends on the undependable, so strong is God’s faith and hope and love.
And what of Mary? What did she feel? Trepidation? Bewilderment? Astonishment? Gratitude? Resolution?
In the traditional depictions of Western art, the Madonna is depicted calm, composed, and placid. The focus has been on her serenity, her holiness, and her submission to the will of God. In recent years other artists have offered a much-needed corrective to this image. Take for instance Amy Grant’s deeply felt and devastatingly beautiful song “Breath of Heaven.” In this track from her 1992 Home for Christmas album, we hear the words of Mary’s self-doubt and fright at the heavy load she has been asked to carry. She wonders if a wiser one should have had her place. She worries that she must walk the path alone. Her heart stretches out in hopes that the breath of heaven hold her together. In the voice of Amy Grant, Mary’s prayer centers on the word “help”—first she prays for help to be strong, then she prays simply to be, and finally her prayer is stripped down to the essential plea: help me.54 We must remember Mary is young and alone. She shoulders so many different emotions. Nevertheless, whatever doubts and fears flutter through her mind, she finds her sense of peace and her courage to go forward.
And so, Mary submits humbly, “let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38) as a “servant of the Lord”—a phrase that is sometimes rendered more delicately as “handmaiden” of the Lord but could also be translated more bluntly as “slave.” She puts herself at the Lord’s disposal in complete trust—an attitude often depicted in statues and icons of Mary where she sits with rounded face framed by blue and white veil. This is the Mary who “pondered all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:19). Even if we credit Mary with unflinching faith, her resolute response to the annunciation is still surprising given her marital status.
As a young girl promised to a man but not yet married, she must know her fate teeters on a socially precarious needle. She has pledged herself to Joseph. As the husband-to-be, Joseph can exercise his rights and divorce her without recompense or explanation. Joseph, not Mary, holds the power in the relationship. It is perhaps for this reason that the Gospel of Matthew focuses on his encounter with the angel as opposed to hers. In Matthew, he is the active agent: Joseph receives the nighttime visit from the angel, Joseph marries Mary, Joseph names the child Jesus (Matt 1:18–25). But, and here is what is really surprising, it must be remembered that even in Matthew’s account, God usurps Joseph’s rights over the girl.55 Before Joseph has any say in the matter, “she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 1:18, RSV). The angel of the Lord only consults Joseph after the fact. And what is more, for having such a seemingly central role in the drama, he is not granted any speaking lines. We have not a single recorded word from the husband of Mary.56 Gently then, God’s Holy Spirit lays a hand on the primordial privilege of patriarchy. The unquestionable rights and prerogatives of the head of the house have been side-stepped and overshadowed. The privilege is not broken, only loosened, and only for a brief festal moment. But the moment is divine, after all. The crack in male privilege is almost imperceptible, but it is there. By God’s grace it will grow.
But for now, we need to return to Mary. Can we get closer to her thoughts?
In March of 2004 a very unlikely meeting took place between the Nobel prize-winning peace advocate Desmond Tutu and a convicted criminal seven months from his date of execution in Texas. Dominique Green had been tried and convicted for a murder that occurred during the course of a robbery in Houston. While on death row, Dominique began a correspondence and friendship with the writer Thomas Cahill and, through a serendipitous series of events, Thomas Cahill was able to arrange a meeting between Dominique Green and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Archbishop Tutu sat down in a tiny cubicle facing a window of thick double glass and waited for the inmate to arrive. On either side of the glass there was a telephone receiver. Through the handsets, visitor and prisoner can converse with each other. Dominique was led in shackled at his wrists and ankles. After his hands were unbound, he sat down, facing the glass and Desmond Tutu. Dominique placed his right hand against the cold, thick pane of glass, a hand that his mother had permanently scarred when she held it over a gas burner, and Archbishop Tutu followed his lead and put his own polio-weakened hand against the glass. It was the closest the two would be allowed to come. Thomas Cahill left them to their own private meeting. As he waited in the adjoining room, he heard peals of laughter and the sounds of genuine friendship and knew that these two strangers would get along just fine.
After Archbishop Tutu finished his hour-and-a-half visit with death-row inmate Dominique Green, he thanked the warden and the prison officials, and then headed across the street to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Livingston, Texas. The church had been asked to host him for the press conference. Swarms of media and news agencies had gathered to cover the story. The church, having graciously agreed to let him hold his press conference there, in turn asked him to celebrate Eucharist. Without hesitation he agreed. The Bible passage assigned by the lectionary for the day of his visit narrated Gabriel’s announcement to Mary of Nazareth that she was to become the mother of Jesus Christ. Speaking to the gathered congregants, reporters, and onlookers, Archbishop Tutu imagined Mary’s response:
“What? Me!! In this village you can’t even scratch yourself without everybody knowing about it! You want me to be an unmarried mother? I’m a decent girl, you know. Sorry, try next door.” If she had said that, we would have been up a creek. Mercifully, marvelously, Mary said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word,” and the universe breathed a cosmic sigh of relief, because she made it possible for our Savior to be born.57
Desmond Tutu’s imaginative musing reminds us that Mary could have told the messenger of the Lord “No.” Indeed, she had every reason to say “No.” And yet, at the risk of her respectability, her standing in Nazareth and before Joseph, she mercifully and marvelously said “Yes.” Mary’s yes is the model for our own responses to God’s will. Her yes had moved Archbishop Tutu to say yes to the invitation to meet with a convicted criminal awaiting execution in Texas. In the face of the cold efficiency of the criminal justice system that cannot help but perpetuate the cycle of victims and offenders, the good Archbishop would have us risk as Mary risked, and be the bridge of salvation that only God’s mercy can build.
Handmaiden of the Lord
A common subject of fifteenth-century Renaissance painters was the annunciation, and sometimes these artistic masters would show a ray of light shafting through a high window onto the young Mary. We look at it and see it as a spotlight drawing the viewer’s eye to center stage, the submissive Mary. And it is
