The meaning of Incarnation: God is more taken with the agony of the earth than with the ecstasy of heaven.

When I read the book of Luke, I am always amazed to hear the revolutionary words that spring from young Mary's mouth when she visits her cousin Elizabeth to share the news of her surprising pregnancy. And I wonder who taught them to her: a sister, a brother, a mother, a father…I can see her nodding off to sleep as these revolutionary words, words that she would perhaps only fully come to understand much, much later, were sung, and I can imagine the baby Jesus, and later the toddler Jesus, nodding off to sleep at the sound of his mother's voice:

While Mary couldn't have understood what those words would mean in their entirety, it is striking to me that she, as a young girl, would have such a deep knowledge and sense of the way that God was working upon the earth, was coming upon the earth. But then, perhaps it's all a matter of perspective.

As we look at the book of Luke, we see that the perspective of the participants in the birth of Jesus was always from the underside. These were not the movers and shakers of their society. These were not the people that all the world was watching. No, indeed, in this story, the good news comes to those who live on the fringes of society, to the poor and obscure, to the oppressed. And Luke is skillful in the way that he gets that point across.

He begins each segment of his ...[continue]