A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. On the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from god but to a town of Galilee named Nazareth, up west of the Lake Of Galilee. And then the angel was sent to a virgin, betrothed to a man named Joseph of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. Upon arriving, the messenger, the angel said to Mary, rejoice, oh highly favored daughter.
The lord is with you. You. Blessed are you among women. At these words, Mary was deeply troubled and wondered what the greeting might mean. Well, the angel the messenger went on to say to her, do not fear, Mary.
You have found favor with god. You shall conceive and bear a son and give him the name Jesus. Great will be his dignity, and he will be called the son of the most high. The lord god will give him the throne of David, his father. He will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and his reign will be without end.
Then Mary said to the angel, how can all of this happen since I do not know man? The angel replied, the holy spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Hence, the holy offspring to be born of you will be called son of god. Know that Elizabeth, your kinswoman, has conceived a son in her old age. This woman, your cousin, who was thought to be sterile, is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible with god.
Then Mary said, I am the maid servant of the lord. That it be done to me as you say. And with that, the angel left her. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Well, today we have one of the most famous texts of the old testament. Of course, it's in the prophet Isaiah. We've been reading the prophet Isaiah almost every day during Advent because here is where well, that is with Isaiah, you find so many of what are called the messianic texts. They're called messianic because depending on how you read them, that is how you interpret the Hebrew, they may or may not bear upon the coming messiah. Now there is no question in the least that the concept of a messiah was well known, was very much part of the Jewish tradition.
That, I mean, no one denies that at all. That's impossible. Now this text, your book here in the English has it, and and this is the keyword. See, what I read to you is, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and, you shall name him Emmanuel because god is with us. Well, the the keyword of this text is that word virgin, and it's just as ambiguous in the Hebrew as the word made is in English.
Now the Hebrew text that the word perversion is, it does not univocally mean a girl, a woman who has not had intercourse. The word in Hebrew can be translated as a girl, as a maiden, as a virgin. But you see, when you bring in that word virgin, you're bringing in a a whole new concept. And, so it all depends on how you translate. The Hebrew does not translate it as a virgin.
We I looked this up just yesterday. The Hebrew not in the Hebrew, but in the in the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish Bible, and they translate it as made, which is probably a a more accurate translation. Because in English, we can say maid can mean a virgin. It's you don't know. When you call a woman a maid, you're just saying she's a young female.
What her sex life has been, who knows? So this is one of the big and it's highly controversial. Libraries have been written on this text to try to prove one thing or the other, and you can't prove it. It's just and remember, there's no question about the Hebrew word in this case. No question about it.
See, remember, when the Hebrew was written, there were no vowels, just consonants. That system of putting the little dots in for vowels is is recent, relatively recent. So that in many instances, all you have with the Hebrew word are the consonants, and depending on the vowels you read, you can come up with different different words. That's not true in this case. The Hebrew word's perfectly clear.
How you translate it is something entirely different. Now, you see, I admit I'm biased, biased, I'm I'm prejudiced, prejudiced, but, of course, I have a very open mind. But today, we don't make much of prophecy. Because as far as I'm concerned, this is the kind of thing you meet. Somebody finds a text in the Old Testament, they say this is a prophetic text.
How do you know that? A lot of times, it depends on how you translate it. Then you get in the whole the whole trouble with language, and you get into whole trouble with interpreting the language, and it goes on and on. And you wind up with volumes of junk, because you don't know anything more at the end than you knew at the beginning that you were dealing with an ambiguous word, just as ambiguous as the word made is in English. Now when you come to say, look today, you have a horse of another color.
And to continue that horsey metaphor, it's a whole new horse race. Now today, even among Catholics and Christians, there's a lot of controversy about what we call the infant texts. That is these the first chapters of Saint Luke, especially, having to do with the the birth not only with the birth, but with the conception and the birth and the early years of our blessed lord. How do you take these texts? What do they mean?
The point I wanna lay before you good people this morning is this. These texts were written in Greek. I mean, they're written down in in black and white or whatever ink they used, around, let us say, 80 or 90, something like that. At the most, say, two generations from the time the events were supposed to have happened, There were people either living or new people who were had had been living when these events took place. There wasn't anything secret about Mary going all the way from Nazareth all the way down to near Jerusalem to visit her cousin Elizabeth.
Now I don't care how you construe these texts. There's one thing you can't get away from. I don't know who this angel was. I don't know how you recognize an angel when you see it. I don't know all of this, and no one else does.
But something very funny happened, and the word for that in in in German is wunderbar, and I love that word. In Latin, it's miraculum, which means something wonderful. We translate it very poorly as miracle. But the point I wanna put make is this, look at what is said here. Now the Hebrews, the Jewish people of of of a Mary's time weren't weren't a bunch of ignoramuses.
They knew that babies have fathers. They knew that a virgin couldn't have a baby. They knew that. And that's borne out by Mary saying when the angel said, you're gonna have a baby. And and Mary says, how can that happen?
I'm a virgin. I'm not even married. I don't have a husband that I'm sleeping with anyway. So how can that happen to me? And now notice what the angel, whoever this thing is, what it says.
Now notice, Mary is up in Nazareth, Nazareth, up in the lake. Yeah. That's in the North. Her cousin is living down not far from Jerusalem. Now the the that's the cousin.
That is the the mother of John the Baptist. The father is Zechariah. Now remember this. Who are they? Zechariah had something very funny happen to him too.
He went in to pray into the temple one day and came out blind. Here's an old man, and he he had a some kind of a vision in that temple. Something about his wife having a baby. Who is his wife Elizabeth? She's old.
She's been sterile her whole life. How do you get a baby out of that? And he's an old man. And he it's public knowledge. He went into the he went into the temple at the hour of prayer.
He had a perfect vision. Here he comes out blind. And and by golly, Elizabeth does have a baby. And he recovers his sight. And that's public knowledge.
And now, going back, Mary's up in the Nazareth now, about a three hour automobile ride in a fast car. And Mary says, how happen to me? In other words, she's saying, look, this is all very fine, but I like some motives of credibility. Why should I believe you? That's what you're saying.
Why should I believe this? It sounds like nonsense to me. And what does this messenger, whoever it is, what does it say? Look, your cousin Elizabeth, way down there near Jerusalem, an old woman, her whole life was sterile, public knowledge. I was a great handicap for a woman, an embarrassment.
She's not only pregnant in her six month notice, but her She's going to have a baby, and it's going to be a male. Now that's that to have that as a motive of credibility is pretty, pretty convincing. Now what becomes much more what does Mary do? She starts walking because that's how she did it probably, with all likelihood. And that's a good long walk, believe me.
She goes from all the way from Nazareth all the way down south to Jerusalem to visit her cousin Elizabeth who's in her sixth month. And she finds Elizabeth pregnant, and later on, the baby is born, and it's a boy. Now if you want some motives of credibility, I'd like to have them. I think they are absolutely matchless. I don't need to go and worry with the text on this.
These are big facts. This was public knowledge. And what happened then could could have easily people could have easily been living when this text was written, or second generation. Now if you want motives of credibility, how can you get it? The only way you can get out of this is to throw the whole business out, And to say, oh, well, you know, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there is just myth.
These were just created stories. Now that's been tried. That's been tried. But in the year of our Lord 1985, it's absolutely absurd that you have tried to do it. Nobody's saying that today.
These texts are, I mean, the fact that we have these texts, is beyond all question of doubt. No one today with any sense was is going to say that this is just, some later writings that that the Christians, you know, that was generated by the Christian consciousness and all that stuff. That was very popular at the turn of the century. So I as we head into the Christmas season, our faith in Jesus Christ, the son of god, isn't based on any little simple matter of language. It's based upon certain, absolutely incredible facts.
Incredible that a woman who is a virgin has a baby, that her cousin who was sterile her whole life and now is an old woman has a baby. That is tremendous. That is absolutely tremendous. And the church is giving this to us because we need it. It's no small thing when you say, became man in the womb of a virgin Jewish girl.
In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen.