Interview with an Angel


Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching, which means that Christmas is not too far behind. Christmas is perhaps the biggest annual show in our culture. Most of the trappings of Christmas have little to do with the original reason and meaning of the holiday, but even that story is one of the biggest shows around. The Christmas storyline – the one dealing with the birth of Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary of Nazareth, that is – is filled with adventure, intrigue and mystery. It features other-worldly visitors, murderous tyrant, seekers and practitioners of occult wisdom, rustic ruffians, a young family on the run, a birth in desperate circumstances. It is a drama through and through. The story has been so thoroughly rehearsed and replayed  for us that we rarely pause to consider who the people might be in this story.

For the next four Sundays, we will be preparing for Christmas by getting to know some of the key players in greater depth. We will be doing this through a series of “interviews.” For example, what might the Archangel Gabriel have to say if he appeared on Oprah? If you could peer into the inner conversations between Mary and Joseph, what might they reveal? Is the innkeeper as heartless and some have made out – relegating the young couple to a place out back with the barnyard animals? And what was up with Herod?

So, for the next several Sundays, we’ll have them in the chair – that coveted spot in contemporary culture on talk shows. This next Sunday it will be Gabriel, the angel in charge of delivering messages to Zechariah and Mary in the Gospel of Luke.  What would it be like to be in charge of delivering messages from the Most High to ordinary peasants? What would Gabriel think about entrusting the entire plan for salvation to a young teenage girl? What might go wrong? What if she says “get lost?”

My favorite take on this whole interchange between Gabriel and Mary is the interpretation offered by the poet W. H. Auden in his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being. It goes like this:

INTUITION:
Look. There is someone in the garden.

FEELING:
The garden is unchanged, the silence is unbroken
For she is still walking in her sleep of childhood:
Many before
Have wandered in, like her, then wandered out
Unconscious of their visit and unaltered,
The garden unchanged, the silence unbroken:
None may wake there but One who shall be woken.

THE ANGEL GABRIEL:
Wake.

GABRIEL:
Mary, in a dream of love
Playing as all children play,
For unsuspecting children may
Express in comic make-believe
The wish that later they will know
Is tragic and impossible;
Hear, child, what I am sent to tell:
Love wills your dream to happen, so
Love's will on earth may be, through you,
No longer a pretend but true.

MARY:
What dancing joy would whirl
My ignorance away?
Light blazes out of the stone,
The taciturn water
Burst into music,
And warm wings throb within
The motionless rose:
What sudden rush of Power
Commands me to command?

GABRIEL :
When Eve, in love with her own will,
Denied the will of Love and fell,
She turned the flesh Love knew so well
To knowledge of her love until
Both love and knowledge were of sin:
What her negation wounded, may
Your affirmation heal today;
Love's will requires your own, that in
The flesh whose love you do not know,
Love's knowledge into flesh may grow.

MARY:
My flesh in terror and fire
Rejoices that the Word
Who utters the world out of nothing,
As a pledge of His word to love her
Against her will, and to turn
Her desperate longing to love,
Should ask to wear me,
From now to their wedding day,
For an engagement ring.

GABRIEL:
Since Adam, being free to choose,
Chose to imagine he was free
To choose his own necessity,
Lost in his freedom, Man pursues
The shadow of his images:
Today the Unknown seeks the known;
What I am willed to ask, your own
Will has to answer; child, it lies
Within your power of choosing to
Conceive the Child who chooses you.


Those final words convey the true depth of the mystery of the Incarnation – not that God should take on flesh, but that it all depends upon human choice, and that one simple person, Mary, said “Yes.”


(Image sources: nativity from http://www.yamchicago.org/beaware/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/nativity.jpg;  http://www.yalecrestliving.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/2-nativity.jpg;  "the Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner from http://blog.beliefnet.com/deaconsbench/annunciation.jpg;  Annunciation by Dante Gabriel Rosetti from http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/portals/0/articles/10259_annunciation.jpg)

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