A Christmas Meditation on Wombs

          It’s a curious story, this drama unfolding in the lives of two women, each one an unlikely choice to participate in the gate-crashing of the universe. God chose women and wombs to house men. And what men! One, the messenger and harbinger of the promised King; the other, the King Himself.

And what wombs! One, unused, a house grown old, the paint peeling, shutters dangling on their hinges, no fit place for a child. Elizabeth had long ago given up any thought of a child playing there.

  The other womb, Mary’s, sparkled with window boxes and fresh paint, the rooms in order, furniture in place, ready and waiting for a child to come and grow and romp and thrive. But not yet! She did not yet know a man, in the biblical sense of knowing.

These facts did not bother God. He had chosen.

           Each of these unlikely women, with unlikely wombs, said “Yes.” Each welcomed God’s will, hardly comprehending God’s plan: bearing this child for nine months, laboring to give birth, nursing the child at her breasts, changing, bathing, training, teaching, making a home.

            It’s a slow process, this method God used to carry out His plan of salvation for the world! Pregnancy, gestation, birth, infancy, childhood, years of training, growth to manhood.

            This fact did not bother God. He chose the method. He always chooses the method.

            And yet. With both Zechariah, husband of Elizabeth, and Mary, we ask, “How…?”

            Here is mystery.

            Elizabeth and Zechariah, in order to cooperate with God, needed to perform a very human but very unlikely act, at their unlikely ages.

Mary’s pregnancy was not only unlikely, her “husband” was the Most High God, by a mysterious, holy overshadowing, causing her womb to become a temple of His Spirit. She was asked to house and nourish the Creator himself who would come into her womb as a human creature—an unlikely baby who would live an improbable life.

            The answer the angel gave to Mary’s question—no doubt a bewildering one—offered her an understanding—though necessarily incomplete—of the immutable God. But it was an understanding that allowed Mary’s “yes.” Nothing was impossible for Him. Including, the angel told her, the pregnancy of her old cousin, whose womb had been considered dead and whose elderly husband should have been incapable of fathering a child at this late date.

            Mary had some prior knowledge of the workings of this God. She knew the history of her people. She knew the prophecies. She did not contest Elizabeth’s excited exclamation, “Blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is it granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” [i]

The mother of my Lord. And the angel had said, “And the Lord God will give Him the throne of his father David, and He will reign…forever.” [ii] It was prior knowledge as well as the simplicity of trust that allowed Mary to say, “Yes.”          

            Indeed, Elizabeth and Mary would each need, in the coming days and years, to keep welcoming God’s plan for her life and her son’s life. Each would need to keep reaffirming her willingness to do God’s will, which included watching these sons with their strange behaviors, their torments and trials, their courage and convictions—and their painful deaths.

She would need to keep saying yes.

No other pregnancies in the universe have had the drama surrounding them as those of Elizabeth’s and Mary’s. Neither Elizabeth’s aged, post-menopausal womb nor Mary’s young, virgin womb should have been able to conceive a child.

Those facts did not bother God. He chose the women. He chose their wombs. He chose the methods. Long before Mary, the prophet Isaiah records the Lord saying, “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” [iii]

God chooses for His purposes—His means and His methods.

Knowledge of the God who has revealed Himself and simple trust enables us to say, “Yes.”

[i] Luke 1:42,43

[ii] Luke 1:32, 33

[iii] Isaiah 7:14

Painting: "Visitation" by Mariotto Albertinelli (1474-1515)