Child of Hope and Promise – Br. Lain Wilson

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Br. Lain Wilson

The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Luke 1:26-38
Ephesians 1:3-6, 11-12

A couple, diligent in their prayers and service, humble in their relationships, faithful to their God. Long denied their one desire: a child of their own. Fervently praying, they are brought tidings of good news by a messenger from God: they will have a child

Anne and Joachim’s story, although not found in scripture, more than echoes other scriptural accounts. Sarah and Abraham, Hannah and Elkanah, Elizabeth and Zechariah: all couples whose joy in children had been withheld, and who eventually were able to conceive following fervent prayer. Anne and Joachim fit into this tradition.

This story, and the feast of the conception of Mary, are thus, from one perspective, standard scriptural fare on the power of God to intervene in the lives of the faithful. But, from another perspective, something new is happening here.

Something new, because Mary will break this pattern. Mary’s own pregnancy, with Jesus, the Son of God and second person of the Trinity, will not be a response to her fervent prayer – like that of her parents or other Jewish forebears. Instead, Mary’s pregnancy will be an invitation to cooperate with God, an invitation accepted: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

The daughter whom Anne and Joachim conceived was the daughter who, when she grew up and encountered the angel, would be perplexed, would question, would reason, and, ultimately, would assent. The daughter chosen by God from the foundation of the world to bear God’s only Son, was formed – formed in the womb, formed in her childhood by her parents – to be a willing partner in the world’s salvation: “let it be with me according to your word.”

Mary, the long-desired daughter of hope and promise, will herself bear hope and promise to a world that cries out for both. A 13th-century Cistercian abbot imagines creation’s response to Mary’s birth: “The whole world leapt for joy, heaven thundered with praise, the earth danced for delight, her song of joy soon joined by the skies above and the seas below.”[1] A broken world crying out for hope and promise replies with exuberant joy.

I recently received joyful news of my own. My best friend and his husband were approved to adopt an adorable young boy. The pictures he sent me reveal, as clearly as anything I’ve experienced, God at work in our lives and relationships: the hope for and promise of God’s healing and redemptive love shining out in the radiant smiles of parents and children.

Revealing as well that the hope and promise of God’s love don’t just work through miraculous pregnancies and traditional family structures. Rather, God’s choosing of Mary illustrates something true of us all, that God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before [God] in love,” and God “destined us for adoption as [God’s] children through Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:4-5).

We may not be, like Mary, products of a miraculous pregnancy. But, like Mary, we are products of God’s choice: chosen from before time, fully adopted as members of God’s heavenly family.[2] And, like Mary, as children of God, we too are children of hope and promise. Like her, we too called to co-labor with God, to reveal God’s healing and redemptive love in our relationships, in our work and service, in our prayer and worship . . . in our very being.

Amen.

[1] Homily 2 in Ogier of Locedio: Homilies: In Praise of God’s Holy Mother; On Our Lord’s Words to His Disciples at the Last Supper, tr. D. M. Jenni (Kalamazoo, MI, 2006), 38.

[2] Paraphrase of the Collect for today’s feast from For All the Saints: Prayers and Readings for Saints’ Days (Toronto, 1994), 371.