THE UNQUALIFIED 'YES'

Luke 1:26-38: Galatians 4:4

Advent is about waiting and preparing to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child. It is also about waiting and watching for the God who has come in our past, who will come in our future, and who, even as we speak, comes in our present closer to us than the breath in our lungs. And when in some mysterious or plainly humdrum event that presence bursts in on us, how do we respond? Advent is about that too.

In your imagination travel with me once again back to the centuries before Christ was born. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and the people were carried away into exile in Babylon six hundred miles away, it seemed as if that might finally be an end to the people who Moses had lead out of slavery in Egypt and had come to be called “Israelites.” Nations and peoples with their own unique identities have disappeared from the earth, like creatures who move from the column of “endangered species” to “extinct.”

But it was not to be for the people of Israel. In a miracle of epic proportions, the people taken away in exile were granted the freedom to return to their homeland. Some of them did. They rebuilt the Temple and the Jerusalem city walls. But they did not find a restored political kingdom of David with the wealth of Solomon’s Empire. What their children’s children found was Persian rule replaced with Greek rule and then, about a hundred years before the birth of Jesus, incorporation – against their will, of course – into the Roman Empire.

Through the years of domination by one great power after the other the prophets’ visions of a Messiah kept the people’s hope alive. The great prophets -- Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel -- had seen visions of a Messiah, but it was the writings of Isaiah that captured the imaginations and kept the attention of most people. There are four or five poems in the book of Isaiah which envision the entrance of one called “the servant of the Lord” onto the stage of history.[1]

Although you may not have recognized them as “Servant Songs,” you are probably familiar with some of them:

“Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
He will bring forth justice to the nations.” (42:1)

And in 49:6

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

If not these, then probably these lines often read around Easter:

“He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.” (53:3)

The identity of this servant has exercised the minds of scholars perhaps more than any other single Old Testament issue. The "servant of the Lord" is sometimes clearly identified as the nation Israel,[2] while in other passages Israel is not mentioned and the reference seems to be to an individual.[3] It seems clear that the poet meant the "people of God," Israel, to be the servant of God, or a faithful remnant of them. And at some point(s) in time that faithful remnant might be reduced to one faithful servant. Think about it: a remnant of one listening for God’s direction. This was not pessimism, but rather confidence that in any given time there would be at least one person on whom God could count. There are those who look at Jesus as the one person remnant of Israel, the one person who was faithful to God.

These visions of the “Servant of the Lord” were so powerful, and so present in the hopes of the people down through the centuries before Christ, that when the New Testament writers looked back on the life, death and resurrection of Christ, nothing else so described him as these poems. Was the prophet Isaiah looking ahead over five hundred years to the coming of Christ? Or was the prophet simply faithfully describing the One God would send sometime? And why was it when Augustus was Caesar in Rome, when Quirinus was governor of Syria, when Herod was the puppet king in Judea, that was the time when God fulfilled the promise made to Isaiah? The apostle Paul said it this way: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent [the] Son, born of woman…” (Galatians 4:4)

In her book, The Gospel According to Abbie Jane Wells, Abbie Jane offers an interesting and important perspective on Paul’s notion of “the fullness of time:”[4]

“Paul…and just about everybody else tends to forget that it took a “yes” from Mary before God could “sent forth his Son” – and if there is any truth to that “when the time had fully come,” it is that Mary’s time had come when she went into labor at the end of her pregnancy: that’s when the time had fully come – that is when Jesus’s time to be born had fully come!

“As for ‘Had Jesus come to a different people in a different place at a different time…’ I don’t think you can juggle his place in history – or Mary’s – that way; and since Jesus was born of Mary, you’d have to get her as well as Jesus into ‘a different people in a different place at a different time’ – which isn’t humanly, or Godly, possible.

“Of course, it is possible for God to have a Son of a woman ‘in a different people in a different place at a different time’ – but that wouldn’t be Jesus, for Jesus was Mary’s son as well as God’s – which lotsa people tend to forget at times.

“For all I know – for all anybody knows – God may have ‘proposed’… through the ages but, as far as we know, Mary was the first one to say an unqualified ‘yes.’… ’When the time had fully come,’ and the ‘Time had fully come’ only because the woman Mary said ‘yes.’”

That seems to be the way God works in history. God waits for “the unqualified ‘yes’” from the most unlikely people to fulfill God’s promises in the world. That should give most of us who see ourselves as “unlikely people” some hope. It should also give us some pause. For what unqualified “yes” is God awaiting from us?

That seems to be the way God works in history. God waits for “the unqualified ‘yes’” from the most unlikely people to fulfill God’s promises in the world. That should give most of us who see ourselves as “unlikely people” some hope. It should also give us some pause. For what is God awaiting an unqualified “yes” from us?

In the early 1870s, a young partially sighted girl known as ‘Little Annie’ was kept locked in a room in the basement in a mental institution outside Boston. This was the only place, said the doctors, for those who were hopelessly insane. In Little Annie’s case, they saw no hope for her, so she was consigned to a living death in a small cell, more like a cage than a room, which received little light and even less hope. About that time, an elderly nurse was nearing retirement. She felt that there was hope for all God’s children, so she started taking her lunch into the basement and eating outside little Annie’s cell. She felt that she might be able to communicate some love and hope to the little girl.

In many ways Little Annie was an animal. On occasions, she would violently attack the person who came into her cell. At other times, she would completely ignore them. When the elderly nurse started visiting her, Little Annie gave no indication that she was even aware of her presence. One day the elderly nurse brought some brownies and left them in the cell. Little Annie gave no hint she knew they were there, but when the nurse returned the next day the brownies were gone. From that time on, the nurse would bring brownies when she made her Thursday visit. Soon after, the doctors in the institution noticed a change was taking place. After a period of time they decided to move Little Annie upstairs. Finally, the day came when this ‘hopeless case’ could return home.”

This elderly nurse, without a name, said an “unqualified ‘yes’” to God and to Little Annie. She reminds me of so many nurses, teachers and parents I have known, persons whose “unqualified ‘yesses’ went far beyond what anyone might have expected of them.

There is one other thing about “Little Annie.” Although free to return to her parents’ home, she did not. She chose to stay at the institution so that she could help others. And she did. She gave an “unqualified ‘yes’ to God and another girl somewhat like her. And through her teaching of a little girl who was blind and deaf, the woman known as Little Annie became the teacher of Helen Keller. Little Annie’s real name was Anne Sullivan. She was able to break through the silence and darkness that surrounded Helen, and gave the rest of her life to teaching and caring for her, enabling Helen Keller to become a distinguished lecturer and one of the great heroines of this century. It was “Little Annie’s” unqualified “yes!” that made it possible.

On the fourth Sunday of Advent, we give special thanks for Mary’s unqualified “yes” to the angel Gabriel: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38) We also give thanks for all those others who have gone before us whose unqualified yeses have contributed to who we are today. What unqualified yes is God asking of you for some task that only you—remember the remnant!—may be able to accomplish? Will you respond as Mary did with “let it be with me according to your word”?

[1] The “Servant Songs” are generally considered by scholars to be the following: Isaiah 42:1-4 (or 1-9); 49:1-6 (or 1-13); 50:4-9 (or 4-11); 52:13-53:12; and sometimes 61:1-3.

[2] 41:8ff; 43:8-13; 49:1-6; and others.

[3] 42:1-4; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:12; and sometimes 61:1-3.

[4] The Gospel According to Abbie Jane Wells. (Thomas Moore Association, 1985) quoted in Rueben P. Job and Norman Shawchuck’s A Guide to Prayer for All God’s People (Upper Room Books, 1990), pp. 32-33.