Zechariah had been a priest for decades. He'd been studying for it since he was a young man. Basically, he'd made a paying career out of following God. (Sweet.) You'd think a guy like that would be pretty close to God, right? You know, the PUSH (pray until something happens) type who wouldn't let anybody mess around with his faith. Rock-solid. Like this (picture my two index fingers hooked around eachother.) The kind of guy who sees a miracle, is in awe and yet still manages to say, "Doesn't surprise me." Amazing, yes. Ridiculous, no. Get the picture?
Yet when the angel tells him that he and his wife will have a son, Zechariah doesn't fall down on his knees and say, "I believe it! Praise God!!!" He doesn't rush out of the temple to the marketplace for a rattle and booties. He doesn't even remember the story of Abraham and Sarah. He says, "How can this be? My wife is old and infertile. I am old. Impossible." This man who'd made it his life's work to know God doesn't believe the angel's message. And for that he goes temporarily mute.
Mary was a betrothed teenage virgin. She'd been raised to be a good Jewish girl, her destiny to be a wife and mother. Being young and inexperienced in life, with a faith taught from birth, you'd expect she was just beginning to seek a personal relationship with God that wasn't built solely upon other's shoulders. She heard the stories of God's miracles in the past as Zachariah had, but I doubt she was the equivalent of a Jewish nun.
Still, she also receives a visit from an angel who says that she's going to conceive and bear a child. She asks also how it would be since she is a virgin. Now the angel cuts Mary some slack because after all, she is a young girl, not an old priest. However, once the angel assures Mary that she will conceive divinely, that's enough for her. She just accepts it like that. Could you? Seriously, one day you're just going through life getting ready to be married, and all of a sudden, "It's gonna be a boy!" She believed it the minute she understood how it would happen. Now how's that for faith? Pretty awesome that it can come from the unlikeliest person.
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I think its also something like a childlike faith. The older we get, the more we've seen, the less trusting we are, the more skeptical. But children (which is what Mary was at the time) are far more likely to trust God without the cynicism and skepticism. That's why Scripture in Matthew 18:3 "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
ReplyDeleteHmmm......education has been our undoing.
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