Fulfilment: "The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God" (Luke 1:35)
These words are so so familiar to us - we hear them every year at this time and we know them inside out. They epitomise the very heart of the Christmas story but I wonder how often we stop to think about what these words really mean.
' come upon you' in the Greek has the meaning of attacking, landing on, influencing'
the word for power in the Greek is the same root as our word for dynamite.
The translated ' overshadow' can also be translated ' to envelop in haze of brilliancy'
So what the angel actually said to Mary might have sounded something like this
' The Holy Spirit is going to land on you like a tonne of bricks and His dynamite power is going to completely blow you away. So the child you will bear, set apart by and for God, will be called the Son of God.'
Yesterday Ben asked me a question. He said ' Mum, apart from getting married and having babies and all that stuff, what has been the most amazing day of your life?' Hmmm. Good question. That made me stop and think. And the day that came back to my mind was the day in my life when the Holy Spirit landed on me like a tonne of bricks and His dynamite power completely blew me away. I have had four or five of those moments in my life. The first was my very first experience of the Holy Spirit when I was knocked off my feet and hit the floor in what felt like extremely slow motion and started to speak in tongues. The second ( and the one which came to mind when Ben asked the question) was when The Spirit visited our church in the days of the ' Toronto Blessing' the weekend John and Carol Arnott were visiting speakers. The third was an experience of deliverance. The other two were powerful encounters with the dynamite of God when I felt as though He was literally going to blow apart every cell in my body, but at the same time knew that I was being powerfully cleansed and cleaned from the inside out.
I know from these experiences that The Holy Spirit is not always( or even often) a gentle breath or a bubbling stream. He is power and light and holy and pure. He is loud and disruptive and miraculous and scary. I think perhaps we have no idea when we read about Mary and the angel just exactly was about to happen to her. I don't think that the Spirit gently wafted around her and smiled the baby Jesus into existence as so many of the paintings of the annunciation suggest. I suspect that when power from on high landed on her, and light and life and power and holiness surged through her body Mary was radically and permanently transformed. From that moment on she must have known that something extraordinary and undeniable and true had happened.
God is not a nice idea, or a way of living or a moral code. God is a powerful, creative, involved, committed, omnipotent Spirit who can and will reach down and touch us with dynamite if we are willing. Can we, with Mary, say ' I am utterly at your disposal. Whatever you say, however it looks, whatever it might mean for my present and my future, Im all in' ?
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