Christmas is our most important holiday, and its literature is correspondingly rich. Yet until now no adequate bundle of Christmas treasures in poetry and prose has found its way onto the Internet for Winter, Christmas, the birth of Christ, Santa Claus, and so much more..Mary Mother of Jesus
Gabriel’s voice softened. “Do not tremble, Mary,” he said. “You have found favor in the eyes of God. Behold: you are to be a mother and to bear a son, and to call him Jesus. He will be great: ‘Son of the Most High’ will be his title, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father, David. He will be king over the house of Jacob forever, and to his kingship there will be no end.”
The words did not calm Mary. Vaguely, she understood that she was to be the mother of a king of kings, but who might this be and how could it occur when she was not even married?
“How will this be,” she said shyly, “since I remain a virgin?”
It was Gabriel’s turn to become specific. He stood in soft radiance in the room and explained. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. For this reason the child to be born will be acclaimed ‘Holy’ and ‘Son of God.’” She now understood the words, but they added to her bewilderment. What the angel was saying, she reasoned, was something for which the Jews had been waiting for centuries: a messiah, a savior, God comes to earth as he had promised long ago. Mary shook her head.
Not to her. Not to her.
Gabriel sensed that the child needed more proof. “Note, moreover,” he said, “your relative Elizabeth, in her old age, has also conceived a son and is now in her sixth month-she who was called ‘The barren.’ Nothing indeed is impossible for God.”
Her eyes lowered to the earthen floor, and her head inclined too. She comprehended. She also understood that the angel had told her about her old cousin Elizabeth, whom she had not seen in some time, so that the fruitfulness of her kinswoman would be the earthly seal of proof to the heavenly words. She, a young virgin, was to be blessed by the Holy Spirit and she would bear a male child who would be God. It was an enormous honor, but she had been taught to accept and obey the will of God from the first moments of early understanding.
“Regard me as the humble servant of the Lord,” she murmured. “May all that you have said be fulfilled in me.”
The angel stood before her in silence, fading slowly from her vision, bit by bit, until all that was visible was the wall. Mary’s impulse was to run and find her mother. She must tell. She must ask counsel. She must convince her mother that she was not inventing a story. Exultation came and it was transmuted to anguish. It was not a dream. Or was it? Could one dream, standing wide awake in one’s house?
No, it was not a dream. She knew that it could not be, because she could not have devised the words that Gabriel used. Now, for a moment, she had trouble remembering them. She wrung her hands and prayed for recollection. Full recollection. She had to know every word and, more important, to understand every word. She prayed and thought and prayed and, little by little, the words and phrases returned until, like a familiar litany, she could recite them without hesitation.
She thought again of her mother and decided not to tell. If the angel had wanted her mother to know, he would have come when her mother was at home, so that both of them would have had knowledge of this thing. He had deliberately selected a time when she was alone. Therefore, it must be the will of God that she keep the secret. Anyway, if her mother or anyone else knew the secret, they would tell it to her, and thus she would know which human beings God had selected to know of the honor.
Surely, she thought, Joseph would know. He was her intended husband. The angel would have to tell Joseph. If he didn’t, then what would Joseph think when she became great with child and he knew that the baby was not his? Oh yes, the angel would surely tell Joseph.
Within a few days, Mary asked, as casually as possible, for permission to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Her mother thought of it as a touching sign of devotion, and sent her off with a family traveling south to Judea. The young virgin said nothing about her secret. Some of the time she seemed to her friends to be lost in a frowning reverie.
Elizabeth was gray and wrinkled, and she had spent many years in the balcony of the synagogue asking God for a child. Her husband, Zachary, was a priest, a small town teacher who had once been selected by the great priests of Jerusalem to be the one to enter the holy place and offer the incense. He felt sorrier for his Elizabeth than he did for himself in the matter of childlessness. He understood the natural maternal feelings of Elizabeth and, unknown to her, he had prayed again and again for a child.
Sometime before the visit of Mary, the angel Gabriel had appeared before the old lady and told her that God had answered her prayers. She would give birth to a son in June, and she must call him John. Someday in the distant future he would be called the Baptist, and he would go ahead of the messiah, preaching and baptizing as he went. The angel told Elizabeth more. Much more.
Elizabeth was standing in her doorway as Mary came up the walk. It was as though she had expected the visit. Mary, an affectionate child, shouted a happy greeting before she reached the door. Elizabeth felt her baby move within her and, in raising her hand in greeting, suddenly burst into tears. “Blessed are you,” she said, “beyond all women. And blessed is the fruit of your womb I” Mary stopped, part way to the door. Her mouth hung open. She could not speak. Elizabeth knew 1 Elizabeth knew the secret 1 Elizabeth wiped her eyes and tried to smile. “How privileged am I,” she said to her niece, “to have the mother of my Lord come to visit me. Hear me now: as the sound of your greeting fell upon my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy! Happy is she who believed that what was told her on behalf of the Lord would be fulfilled.”
The last sentence was a quasi-warning for the young girl to erase all doubt from her mind, and become reconciled to the greatest duty of all ages. Mary had not doubted. She had believed the words, but she could not convince herself that she was the one, of all women on earth, selected to bear the Baby. Now she was convinced. She no longer tried to divorce her person from the prophecy. She had told no one of the secret, and here Aunt Elizabeth not only knew about it, but was pregnant exactly as the angel had said she would be.
