Friday: Two Ways to Avoid a Messiah

Yesterday we stopped at an overlook in Nazareth just long enough to look over at the Church of the Annunciation in the distance. This structure marks the traditional spot where Gabriel appeared to the virgin Mary and told her she would bear the Christ. We didn't stay long. Our real destination was the Cliffs of Precipitation where, again according to tradition, the people attempted to heave Jesus into the gorge when he preached a sermon on racial inclusiveness. (No one has built a church there, presumably because no one wanted to risk planting ideas in a congregation's heads.)

But I stared down into the valley and thought of the lovely sonnet "Annunciation" from Malcolm Guite's book "Sounding the Seasons":

We see so little, stayed on surfaces,

We calculate the outsides of all things,

Preoccupied with our own purposes

We miss the shimmer of the angels’ wings.

They coruscate around us in their joy

A swirl of wheels and eyes and wings unfurled,

They guard the good we purpose to destroy,

A hidden blaze of glory in God’s world.

But on this day a young girl stopped to see

With open eyes and heart. She heard the voice;

The promise of His glory yet to be,

As time stood still for her to make a choice;

Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,

The Word himself was waiting on her word.


"We see so little." Maybe the problem isn't a lack of angelic visitations but a lack of attention to angels. Maybe the difference is not that an angel came to Mary, but that Mary noticed the angel. Hebrews 13.2 speaks of encountering "angels unawares." The Scripture rings with tales of those who did or did not know an angel when they saw one, and of the various consequences that follow. The men of Sodom saw two men and not two angels and thus attempted the most unfortunate case of date-rape in history. Jacob the double-dealer noticed the angels who met him as he trudged toward high-noon with Esau. He called the spot, "Two Camps" to remind himself that he had better backup than his own trick of keeping two sets of books. Balaam missed the angel that any ass could see and nearly rode straight into his doom.

Nazareth wasn't exactly the kind of place to get one in the mood for angel-gazing. Unnamed in the lists of cities found in various Old Testament records, it was probably more of a tiny huddle of extended family, a bedroom community for construction workers in the Roman city of Sephoris about five miles over the hill. Cana regularly creamed them in football, leading to Nathaniel's standard sneer: "Nazareth? They can't even mount a decent passing attack, let alone produce a messiah."

But if you think about it, and peruse a few biblical descriptions of God's throne room in Heaven, no place on earth has much chance of impressing these ministering spirits. Why not Nazareth? Why not Corpus Christi? Why not Your Town's Name Here?

It is impossible, unless your Calvinism is absolutely too pointy to admit the possibility, not to be struck with the sonnet's  closing lines: "Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,/The Word himself was waiting on her word." As I trooped back to the bus and trundled off to see where a congregation once attempted deicide, I wondered: On what word from me does the Word wait today? In what way will Christ not come until I say, "Be it unto me according to thy word"? I don't think I'd ever fling Jesus off a mountain. It's much easier just to prevent his showing up in the first place.