As a little girl, I sometimes ran around with a blanket draped over my head and a doll bundled up in my arms.
“Who are you pretending to be,” my mom asked.
“I’m Mary from the Bible,” I replied.
Mary captured my imagination. I wondered if an angel appeared to me, would I be scared? I hoped if God called me to do something scary, I would say “yes.”
Perhaps God designed the Christmas story to prompt us to ask these kinds of questions. Maybe he cast such ordinary characters — shepherds, innkeepers, a confused carpenter, and a young girl — so we could see ourselves in the story.
The Christmas story, after all, is full of invitations. The angels invite the shepherds to behold their Savior. A star summons the wise men. And while the angel Gabriel’s message to Mary sounds more like an announcement than a request, he patiently answers Mary’s questions and waits to hear her acceptance of her role in the miraculous story.
“‘I am the Lord’s servant,’ Mary answered. ‘May your word to me be fulfilled.’ Then the angel left her” (Luke 1:38).
Mary’s acceptance of God’s call is reminiscent of the opening verse of Luke: “Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:1, emphasis added).
The invitation is a mark of God’s favor. But saying “yes” will cost us.
Luke hints that the invitation offered to Mary is extended to all of us: “Will you be a servant of the word and carry the love of God into the world?”
The invitation is a mark of God’s favor. But saying “yes” will cost us. Later in Luke, a man named Simeon prophesies to Mary, “…a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:34).
Jesus is the Son of God, but he was Mary’s son, too, a baby she loved, who became a man she watched suffer and die.
People are children of God, beings he made for goodness and joy, who became sinners he watches suffer and die.
Through Simeon’s words, we hear God’s heart, pierced by the pain of his children — by your pain. God didn’t just invite Mary to serve a divine purpose but to experience the depth of his love.
It’s as if God is saying to Mary, “know how much I love you. This rending pain of loving a child destined to die is what I have felt for generations of sin-bound humanity. This desperate parental desire to save the suffering child at any cost is what I feel for you. It is unthinkable for a parent to sacrifice a child. And yet, because my heart is pierced and aching for you, I will sacrifice my Son. Know my parental love and the incredible depth of what it cost me.”
God’s invitation into the Christmas story and the gospel story is an invitation to glory and grief. When God invites us to be servants of the word to the ends of the earth, he invites us to love the world sacrificially, to experience the love a parent feels for their child, the love he feels for us.
When we echo Mary’s “yes,” two beautiful things happen. First, we experience the intensity of God’s love for us. Second, our love takes on a new power that drives us to go unfathomable distances and do impossible things for the sake of people God loves.
Paul sums it up well in Ephesians 3:17-19: “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
The question the Christmas story should prompt us to ask of ourselves is not what we would say if God invited us, like Mary, into a miraculous experience of his love, but what will we do with the invitation we have already received?
