Gabriel Comes to Nazareth

An ordinary day in an ordinary house in a very small village. A young woman is going about her work. And then a voice says: Greetings, you who are highly favoured. The Lord is with you.

Six months have passed since the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah in the temple in Jerusalem, the grandest building in the land. Now God sends Gabriel somewhere very different. He goes north, to Galilee, to a town called Nazareth. It is a farming village in the hills, so small and unimportant that it is never mentioned in the Old Testament. Years later, someone would ask, can anything good come out of Nazareth? There, Gabriel is sent to a young woman, a virgin, engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, who is descended from King David. And the young woman's name is Mary.

Gabriel comes in to her and says, “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” Luke tells us that Mary was greatly troubled at his words. Not only by the angel himself, but by the greeting. She wondered what kind of greeting this could be. Why would God's messenger speak to her like this? She was young, from a humble family, in a forgotten village. She was not a priest in the temple. She had not been praying for a son. Highly favoured did not mean that Mary had earned something. It meant that God had chosen to show her his grace.

So the angel speaks gently, as he spoke to Zechariah. “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.” Then he gives her the news. You will conceive in your womb and give birth to a son, and you are to call his name Jesus. Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua, which means the Lord saves. Mary does not get to choose her son's name. God has already chosen it, and the name tells the world what he has come to do.

And Gabriel is not finished. He tells Mary who her son will be. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. Mary would have known what those words meant. God had promised King David, a thousand years earlier, that a son of his would reign for ever. Prophets had repeated the promise through exile and return. Families had waited for it through generations. Now an angel was telling a young woman in Nazareth that the promised King would be her son.

Luke says Mary was espoused, or betrothed, to Joseph. Betrothal in Jewish life then was much more than a modern engagement. It was a binding agreement. The couple were legally committed to each other, and ending it required something like a divorce, which is why Matthew says Joseph considered putting Mary away quietly. Usually the bride kept living with her own family for a time, often about a year, before the wedding, when she moved into her husband's home.

You'll find Gabriel's greeting in Luke chapter one, verses twenty-six to thirty-three. God's greatest promise did not arrive in a palace or a temple, but in a village no one expected, to a young woman no one had heard of. So here is a question to carry with you. What does it tell you about God that he chose Nazareth, and Mary, for the most important news in history?