“What Child is This?”
Luke 1:26-38
12/21/08
The well-known Christmas hymn “What Child is
This?” begins with the question, “What Child is this, who,
laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping?” The
disciples of Jesus asked a similar question concerning Him when years
later they witnessed Him calming a storm with His words.
“Who then is this,” they asked, “that even wind and
sea obey Him?” Today’s text from the Gospel according
to St. Luke answers this question for us. Here, from the mouth of
the angel Gabriel, we are given to know just who this Child/this Man is
who was born of the virgin Mary, born in Bethlehem, Israel, born under
the reign of King Herod, some 2,000 years ago.
Gabriel not only gives us a number of names for this
Child, but he also uses a number of adjectives to describe Him, and he
tells us what this Child would do. The first Name we are given
for this Child is the Name Jesus. Gabriel tells Mary, “You
will conceive in your womb and bear a Son, and you shall call His Name
Jesus.” This Name is significant, because it tells us both
who this Child is and also what He would do. The Name Jesus means
“God is salvation,” or “God saves.” Now,
you may know of a number of “Hesuses” today. (My
brother once told me a rather humorous story about a friend of his
whose mother wrote him a note one time, reminding him that the gardener
would be coming over that day. The gardener’s name happened
to be “Hesus,” but Hesus in Spanish is spelled with a
“J.” So the note read: Jesus is coming; make
sure you leave the gate unlocked for him.) The point is, there
may be many “Jesuses,” but there is only One who both is
and does His Name, and that is the Child that was conceived by the Holy
Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. That Child was and still is
God in the flesh who came to save us from our sins.
Next, Gabriel gives us a brief description of this
Jesus, saying He will be “great.” Now, I looked up
this word in Greek to see what kind of definition I could find for
it. First, it can mean great as in big, spacious, or large.
But this hardly seems to fit the context. Gabriel is not telling
us how big Jesus would be. The size of the Lord has no bearing on
our salvation. (Still, isn’t it interesting that you never
picture Jesus as being smaller than yourself?) Another definition
of the word “great” has to do with greatness in terms of
age, quantity, or intensity. Here the word is used in describing
amounts. But this too doesn’t seem to fit the context, as
Gabriel is not telling us how much God Jesus would be. Some would
like to limit Jesus’ deity, when they say things like,
“Jesus is only part God,” or “The whole infinite God
couldn’t possibly fit into a finite human body,” or
“Jesus can’t be with you in His body; that’s at the
right hand of God the Father in heaven. Only His spirit can be
with you.” No, the Child that Mary bore was fully God as
well as fully Man - no fractions, yesterday, today, or forever.
But there’s one more definition of the word
“great” that does seem to fit, and that is that Jesus is
great in terms of His rank and dignity. Because Jesus is God in
the flesh, He is greater in this sense than anything that He’s
created, even greater still than anything or any god that we create
from our own imagination. This Child, conceived by the Holy
Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, is the same God who demonstrated
His infinite greatness over all the false gods of the Egyptians, when
He judged them with His plagues and saved His people from their slavery
under them. Yet, His greatness would be no good news for us, if
it were simply a declaration of His naked power. We Christians
don’t simply say, “God is great!” and leave it at
that, because in all of His greatness, God could and ought to throw us
into hell. He has the power to do it and it’s what we
deserve on account of our sin. But God wants us to know of His
greatness in overthrowing our enemies and rescuing us from them.
He wants us to know that He is greater than our sin, greater than the
devil, the world, and all their false gods put together, and that in
His greatness He, the Child born of the Virgin Mary, has saved us.
And to confirm that He has the power to save us, the
angel Gabriel gives us another Name for this Child - Son of the Most
High, which is Son of God. Gabriel tells Mary, “The Holy
Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will
overshadow you; therefore the Child to be born will be called holy -
the Son of God.” In accordance with these words we confess
in both the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds that Jesus was conceived
and incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary. And in the
Athanasian Creed we confess that “He is God, begotten from the
substance of the Father before all ages, and He is Man, born from the
substance of His mother in this age.” Many have debated
what it means that Jesus is “begotten.” Others
can’t understand how God can have a Son. For some these
words suggest that Jesus had a beginning, that He was a creation of God
the Father, and that He is therefore somehow less than God. Even
we Christians have a hard time explaining these things. But
because this is what God’s Word says of Him, we confess that
Jesus Christ is the only-begotten Son of God, that He did not become
God’s Son nor was He created but that He has been the
only-begotten of the Father from all eternity, that He is fully God,
and that He took on human flesh in time. The Child conceived by
the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary is both the Son of God and
the Son of Man, true God and true Man.
For this reason, Jesus can do what the angel Gabriel
announces He would do: sit on the throne of His father David and
reign over the house of Jacob forever in a kingdom that will have no
end. Here again we see that Jesus is not only true God but also
true Man, because through Mary He has human ancestry.
Specifically, He is a descendent of King David, and as such, heir to
his throne. The significance of this is seen in the promise that
God made to David when He said, “I will raise up your offspring
after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish His
kingdom. He shall build a house for my Name, and I will establish
the throne of His kingdom forever.” Now, the sons of David
ruled over Israel and Judah for many years, but eventually their reign
came to an end, when Israel ceased to be a country on account of their
rebellion against God. It would have seemed that God had failed
to keep His promise that David’s reign over Israel would be
established forever. But that depends on your understanding of
both David and Israel. There was the historic David, who only
reigned for forty years over the historic country of Israel and then
died. And yet, God promised through His prophets, saying,
“Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among
which they have gone, and will gather them from all around, and bring
them to their own land... My servant David shall be king over
them, and they shall all have one shepherd.” How could this
be, since David was long dead? From Luke we see that the David
who fulfills these promises of God is the new David, David’s Son,
God’s Son, Jesus Christ. He sits on David’s throne
reigning over the house of Jacob. But the house of Jacob over
which He reigns is not the physical descendants of Abraham who like to
call themselves Israel, but it is the true Israel - all those who are
of the faith of Abraham, all those who have been gathered by the Holy
Spirit from all the nations of the world - Jew and Gentile alike, who
trust in God their Savior, Jesus Christ, to save them from their
sins. Over these the Child of Mary is King of kings and Lord of
lords, and He will reign forever and ever.
But in order to save His people from their sins,
this Child had to be holy, as the angel Gabriel says of Him. He
had to be separated from sin, set apart by God to take away the sin of
the world and to create for Himself a holy nation, a people belonging
to Him. No child born in the ordinary, natural way is holy.
The sin of Adam and Eve has been passed on to every one of us, their
descendants. But Jesus, begotten of the Father from all eternity
but conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary in time,
is holy, righteous, and sinless. These characteristics are His by
nature, because He is God and Son of the Most High. But again, it
doesn’t help us to know how holy, righteous, and sinless Jesus is
in and of Himself, because in all His holiness, righteousness, and
sinlessness He could cast us, who are not holy, righteous, and sinless,
into hell. But God did not send this Child, His Son, into the
world to show off His holiness and condemn us in the process. He
sent Him, so that He could save us from our sins and take our
unholiness away. Because He had no sin of His own, He was able to
take your sin upon Himself, take it to the cross, and there shed His
blood, in order to atone for it.
You who were once not holy are now made holy as the
Holy Spirit delivers this Holy Child and His holiness to you. And
Mary is a picture of this. She is a picture of how God uses the
Spirit and the Word to deliver Jesus to us. As Mary heard the
words of the angel, who delivered the Word of God to her, she conceived
the Child, Jesus, in her womb. The Holy Spirit came upon her and
the power of the Most High overshadowed her as God’s Word came
into her ears. Through the Spirit’s work she believed that
Word, and as a result Christ came to dwell in her. In a similar
way Jesus comes to dwell in us. As we hear the Word, the Holy
Spirit works faith in our hearts to believe that Word, and Christ
enters in. Through our Baptism the Spirit comes upon us and His
power overshadows us as the Name of God is placed upon us, and Christ
enters in. Through the Lord’s Supper He puts Christ’s
body and blood into our mouths for us to eat and to drink for the
forgiveness of our sins, and Christ enters in. Even Mary herself
wouldn’t have been closer to Him while she bore Him in her womb,
than when she partook of His body and blood in His holy Supper.
Mary, then, represents the Christian Church. As we hear the Word
of God taught and proclaimed to us, as we receive Holy Baptism, Holy
Absolution, and the Holy Supper, the Holy Spirit works to deliver Jesus
and His holiness to us, so that we too may now be called holy - holy
people separated from sin and belonging to God, a people whom He calls
His children through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ.
This is the Child who was born of the Virgin
Mary. His Name is Jesus. He is God our Savior. He is
great and is called the Son of the Most High. He is also the Son
of David and reigns over the house of Jacob, the Israel of God,
forever. Conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin
Mary, He is the holy Son of God, who came to bear our unholiness on the
cross, atoning for our sins with His blood, with which He has washed us
in Holy Baptism in order to make us holy. Hearing all these
things spoken about Jesus, the Child that she was to carry, Mary
responded by saying, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let
it be to me according to your Word.” May we say the same
thing. In light of all that we are given to know about this
Child, who He is, and what He comes to do for us, let us also say to
Him, “Behold, we are your servants; let it be to us according to
your Word. Let your Word have its way with us, that we might be
holy, righteous, and blameless before you, live under your grace and
mercy now in this age, and in the age to come live and reign with you
in your heavenly kingdom forever.” Amen.