Holly An Angel Visits Mary Holly

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, ‘Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you.’

Drawing of Mary and the Angel Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.’

‘How will this be,’ Mary asked the angel, ‘since I am a virgin?’

The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.’

‘I am the Lord’s servant,’ Mary answered. ‘May it be to me as you have said.’ Then the angel left her.

Luke 1: 26-38

Mary was probably about 14 to 16 years of age when she gave birth to Jesus. This was a very common age for young women to be engaged and marry in biblical times. So the son of God was the son of a teenage mother. Joseph was probably slightly older, around 30.

Joseph and Mary were a very average couple in Israel at that time. They would have been quite poor. Joseph was a carpenter and this job was seen by some religious leaders as a religious duty rather than a profession. Both Joseph and Mary were descendants of King David of Israel, but at this time his family was in the poorest state it had ever been. Mary was also related to the traditional Priest families of Israel through her cousin Elizabeth.

Nazareth, the town where they both lived, was a small hill town on a caravan route through the country. It also had a centre for the temple priests, in which they could come and pray and fast when they were not on duty at the temple. So a wide range of people would travel and visit a town like Nazareth.

In Jewish law, an engagement like Joseph and Mary’s was treated almost like a marriage and could only be broken by an official divorce.

The Angel Gabriel, who visited Mary, is God’s chief messenger angel and only appears to very important people in the Bible. The first words that Gabriel spoke to Mary ‘Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.’ are very important words. ‘Highly favoured’ means ‘God’s holy grace is upon you’ and is a divine blessing from God — something that would have never normally been said to a peasant girl like Mary! She would have been very scared by this and that is why Gabriel said ‘Do not be afraid’.

The name Jesus (or Jeshua as it would have been said then) was a very common name in Israel at that time. If you had gone down a normal street and called JESHUA to some children playing, it is more than likely that a couple of them would be called Jeshua! The name Jesus means ‘Saviour’ and has a very important meaning in the story.

Mary would have been very surprised with the Gabriel saying that the Holy Spirit would be in her, because in the old Jewish stories, only the very important people had the Holy Spirit come into them. She might not have even believed that it is was going to happen, so she went to see her cousin Elizabeth, who Gabriel said would have a baby, to see if it was really true. She did this even before she told Joseph about Gabriel and Jesus.


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Last modified: Mon Sep 24 22:36:00 JST 2001