Most highly-favored lady

Well, we’re rounding the turn into the final stretch of Advent. Today is Annunciation Sunday, the night we light the fourth candle in the wreath and consider what it might have been like for a very young woman in Nazareth to be paid a visit by one of God’s biggest guns, the Archangel Gabriel.

Gabriel was one of the guardians of Israel. In the Old Testament, he appeared to Daniel, to interpret his visions. He also was sent (as recounted in the Book of Ezekiel) to destroy Jerusalem. In the New Testament, he appeared to Zacharias, to tell him that his wife Elisabeth would bear a child (John the Baptist). Elisabeth being Mary’s cousin, I suppose it’s possible she’d heard about Gabriel’s visit, so maybe she wasn’t completely laid out by having an archangel show up in her room and telling her that she’d been chosen to bear the son of God. Without any kind of sexual activity.

Well, maybe, but I think it must still have been quite the BFD back in those days, in the backwater of civilization, and it must have been overwhelming.

“Gabriel’s Message” is a Basque carol that’s based on a 13^th Century Latin carol. I’m giving you Sting’s take on it.