Reflections from The Hill – Favoured or Flavoured?

It is no small thing to be regarded, highly or otherwise, or to be favoured, especially when you are acutely aware that you shouldn’t be.

I had a mate who was in line for “The Headmaster’s Special Prize” at his school’s Graduation Ceremony. He thought that he would get one of the many shining statuettes on view but instead scored an illuminated scroll.

His disappointment was only temporary because the applause that went with the announcement was rapturous and, in talking with him later, was far better than a gleaming statue.

Like I say, it’s no small thing to be favoured.

I often wonder what it would be like to experience, you know, God’s favour. And I wonder how many people in parish-land need to hear those words now – not later, not at Christmas, not in the months ahead.

So much of our time, pre-Christmas, is spent or spending; thinking of others and what on earth we can get for someone who has everything.

To hear that God favours us brings the Incarnation to our hearth. We see this when the Big Angelic Kahuna appears to Mary in today’s Gospel and it shifts our spirits from being flavoured to being favoured, all in the middle of the Christmas shopping.

But there’s more, because Mary now finds herself in a maelstrom of impossibilities. It’s not just that her elderly, barren, relative is pregnant but that she, a youthful teenage nobody from nowhere special is now highly favoured.

Our set ideas and imaginations of Christmas get turned on their ear. Without so much as a by-your-leave, we now find ourselves in the presence of a God who specialises in turning the impossible into the possible.

Let’s not kid ourselves; unless our brain does a back-flip, the sort of scenario that’s being played out here offends our sensibilities because these things simply don’t happen in reality.

Mary herself, in the Gospel reading, almost innately, recognises this impossible possibility in her initial response. Gabriel has only said a Biblical “G’day” and straightaway, Mary is into the pondering.

Why? Why the bewilderment? Simply because Mary herself can’t yet believe that there is a God anywhere who would want to have anything to do with her.

“Me? Why me? Who am I that I should be favoured?” she asks. (As an aside, Mary sounds just like my mother: never looking for favours and always surprised when some should come her way. Mum knew her place.)

“This shouldn’t be happening to me. I’m only a kid, barely into puberty and from the wrong side of the tracks. God doesn’t talk to, or highly favour, people like me.”

Of course, Gabriel hasn’t yet given her the full heads-up for his visit yet, but it comes. Mary’s beside herself. “A baby son? Of the Most High? Line of David? Never-ending Kingdom? Whaaa… “

First there’s the “Why me?” then the “How?” This, in turn, becomes “Here I am.” But be careful.

Do we get the level of disbelief in this or are we stuck on the last part, the obedience bit? Are we relegating Mary’s astonishment to some kind of obligatory and prophetic answer? It’s a shame if we do.

There is a whole journey in this for those with eyes to see, from the absence of God (v34) to recognising His presence (v35) and then to fulfilling His promise (v36).

To collapse the "Here I am" too quickly into our notions of answering God's call simply reduces Mary to being a bit-player in a religious play. She has feelings, too, you know.

Mary's story moves us from being who we think we are to being what God has called us to be; from being an observant believer to being a confessing one.

More than that, and quite impossibly, Mary's story demands that we acknowledge the transforming power of God. That’s what His business is about, after all.

It is no small journey to go from our comfortable perceptions of God to God in the manger; vulnerable, helpless, and dependent. Yet this is the promise, and the journey, of Christmas.