Jesus by James Martin Read Free Book Online

however, the inscription reads: Verbum caro hic factum est , “The Word was made flesh here. ”
    I gripped the cold iron grille and prayed, wondering if the words to Mary, so familiar to Christians, were first uttered here. Or somewhere very near here.
    Despite the important fact that Jesus lived for some thirty years in Nazareth and is frequently referred to as “Jesus of Nazareth,” what is celebrated in the main church in Nazareth is not his young adulthood, or his career as a carpenter here, or even his later preaching in the town synagogue (something that would get him kicked out of town), but something else: his mother, and how she discovers that she will give birth.
    Perhaps the people behind the naming of the basilica understood that as important as these other incidents in Jesus’s life were, something else was equally important: the strange circumstances of his birth. Our pilgrimage into the life of Jesus, then, begins with a look at his mother. And with the story of her encounter with the divine.
    T HE G OSPEL OF L UKE moves swiftly to introduce the protagonist of the story: Jesus of Nazareth. After a short prelude telling his readers that he plans to set forth an “orderly account” of the “events that have been fulfilled among us,” Luke begins his Gospel with the announcement of the birth of John the Baptist.
    Zechariah is fulfilling his priestly duties in the Temple in Jerusalem when the Angel Gabriel appears to announce that his wife, Elizabeth, an elderly woman thought incapable of conceiving, will bear a son. The couple, says Gabriel, are to name the baby John.
    Not surprisingly, Zechariah doubts. “How will I know that this is so?” For his doubting, he is struck dumb until the child is born. Elizabeth then remains “in seclusion” for five months. 6
    About a half a year later, something even more extraordinary happens. “In the sixth month,” Luke says, “the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth.”
    With that dramatic sentence Luke tells us not only that the angel (the Greek word is angelos , meaning “messenger”) was sent by God, but also that he was sent to a particular place. Luke is greatly concerned with history; his Gospel will pinpoint towns and cities and months and Jewish festivals and which rulers were in charge, to ground his account in time and place. For anyone who imagines God as far above something as banal as human history, here is God choosing a particular time (the sixth month), a particular location (Nazareth), and a particular person (Mary). Theologians call this the “scandal of particularity.”
    The angel comes to a woman named Mary, who is betrothed to Joseph. Betrothal was a formal agreement to marry that lasted for a year. The woman involved was usually quite young, sometimes in her late teens. 7 But it was a binding contract. Thus, Mary would have been seen for all practical purposes as Joseph’s wife. 8 This is why, later on, when Joseph discovers that Mary is pregnant, he would be well within his rights to divorce her. Luke also tells us that Joseph was of the line of David.
    The angel’s words to the young woman may be the most famous greeting in the New Testament. Chaire, kecharitōmenē is the Greek, 9 usually rendered “Hail, full of grace” or, in an unfortunate translation, “Greetings, favored one,” which sounds like the first words of an alien newly landed on earth. It may be impossible to replicate the beautiful alliteration of the Greek, but one reference book provides a lovely series of possible explanations of how the angel addresses Mary: “endowed with grace, dearly loved, endued with divine grace.” 10 The tense used indicates that Mary has already been gifted. It is not the angel’s visit that confers grace; God has done this. Though Mary holds no great position like Zechariah, and though she is most likely