Luke 1:35 (ESV)
[35] And the angel answered her,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will
overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy— the Son of
God.
The child will be called holy.
The world would look at Mary and call the child unholy, the obvious result of
immorality. But this child was not the result of immorality. He was the result
of the overpowering, overshadowing Holy Spirit. Two verses later the angel made
reference to Genesis 18 where Abraham was told that Sarah would have a child. “Is
anything too hard for the LORD?” he was asked. Here, the sign for Mary is that Elizabeth,
in her old age like Sarah, was already with child. “Nothing,” Gabriel says, “will
be impossible with God.”
I have a friend on Facebook whose
almost daily posts are directed at evangelical believers. I don’t know what the
church has done to hurt him, but believers are cast as unthinking, hypocritical
purveyors of evil. The sad truth is that his accusations are sometimes at least
partially true. We are sometimes unthinking and hypocritical, yet whatever the
world chooses to label us, in Christ we are holy. We are not proud of that; we
are humbled by that truth.
Jesus is holy because he is the Son
of God. We are holy because Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus was demeaned,
attacked, rejected, and crucified despite being the holy Son of God. We may be
demeaned, attacked, rejected, and maybe even killed for our faith, but we are
still children of God by grace through faith because Jesus is the holy Son of
God who died and rose to give us the gift of life. Whatever we are called, may
we respond with the love and compassion of Jesus who, while hanging on the
cross, said of his tormentors and executioners, “Father, forgive them for they don’t
know what they are doing.”
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