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1. There has been a large recoil of unbelief from these first chapters of Matthew and Luke. How comes it, many ask, if this be any proper history of facts, that it is made up so largely of poetic material?

(1) First, we must observe, there is a great facility of verse in the Hebrew and Syriac tongues, so that minds but a very little excited almost naturally break into the couplet form of utterance.

(2) Next, the Incarnation itself is an event so conspicuous and glorious, that everybody knowing it ought to be taken by some great mental commotion, lifted by some unwonted inspiration.

(3) Furthermore, I will even dare to aver that the manner of this Incarnation-story is natural, and is cast in a form of the strongest possible self-affirmation. It comes to pass in just the only way conceivable or credible.

2. At this point my subject, which is Mary, the mother of Jesus, takes a most remarkable turn. Suddenly she drops out of improvising, out of song and singing joy, into a very nearly total and dumb silence; giving us to hear no spoken word again, save in a very few syllables, and but twice in her whole after-life. Not by the poverty of her nature that she is silent. Self-retention is the almost infallible token of a strong, deep character.

3. Jesus, a Man of thirty years old, goes to a wedding. And there we are let into a new chapter, at the very hinge of His public life, and the new relation He is to have to His mother. No reprimand, however, in His words to her ("Woman, what have I to do with thee?") save under the English idiom.

4. Look now for a moment at the home-basis Mary has provided for Jesus in the prosecution of His ministry. We see His mother's family all engaged for Him and with Him, and even if they do not believe in Him, they will stick fast by Him, we can see, in divinest and most faithful love.

5. Mary's behaviour at the cross fitly ends her story. She " stood" — a word of strong composure. Doubtless she remembers the word of Simeon — "Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also." But there she stands, in the beloved disciple's company, holding fast the decencies of sorrow, as if the proprieties of the worlds were upon her. How long after this she lived we do not know. But we could most easily believe that when her mind was opened at the Pentecost, to the meaning of her Son's great mission, she was at once so astounded and exalted by the awful height of her relationship, that her soul took wing in the uplift of her felt affinity with the Highest, and was gone! But we have no such traditions.

6. Her disappearing from us, however, does not bring her story to an end; it only prepares our final appearing to her, on a higher plane of life, where she will most assuredly be the centre of a higher feeling than some of us may have imagined. Probably there was never any created being of all the created worlds put in such honour as this woman, chosen to be the Lord's mother; all the more truly our mother, that, from her begins the new-born human race. "Hail, thou highly favoured!" "Blessed art thou among women."

(Horace Bushnell, D. D.)

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KJV: And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,

WEB: Now in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,