Luke 1:35

‘And the angel answered and said to her,

“The Holy Spirit will come on you,

And the power of the Most High will overshadow you,

For which reason also he who is born will be holy,

He will be called the Son of God.”

As we consider this verse we have to pause in hushed reverence, for none of us can even begin fully to appreciate its significance. It is beyond human thought and understanding. It was not a man who would come on her and cast his shadow over her, but the Holy Spirit, the power of the Most High. That is why the One to be born would be the ‘Son of the Most High’. And the result would be that conceived within her by that great creative power would be One Who was ‘holy’ or ‘a holy thing’, Who would be a man and yet ‘called the Son of God’. And why would He be called the Son of God? Because He was begotten of the Holy Spirit, because He was the begotten of God (compare John 1:14; John 1:18; 1 John 5:1). This is the clear implication. So in these combined sets of words of the angel we have a clear indication of the supernatural birth and status of the One Who was coming, as well as the clear indication that He would be the Messiah, and more than the Messiah. In Marks’ words He would be ‘the Son of God’. In John’s words, He would be the eternal ‘Word made flesh’.

But we should note that we are simply told of what will happen. No attempt is made to describe Mary’s actual experience. This was no crude event susceptible to man’s description. It was rather the result of God’s creative and active power bringing about conception, probably without Mary at the time even being aware of it. She would probably not even know the moment when conception took place.

The Holy Spirit was to fill John from his mother’s womb, but the One described here comes because the Holy Spirit comes on Mary and works within her in divine power, before He is in the womb, producing One Who is in His manhood ‘of the Spirit’ even in His conception. For the idea of ‘overshadowing’, compare the cloud which overshadows both Jesus and His three Apostles in Luke 9:34. It is a way of indicating that God is present and acting.

John and Jesus are in fact seen as contrasted in a number of ways:

· The messenger is call Yo-annen (YHWH is gracious - Luke 1:13), the Son is called Ye-sous (YHWH is salvation - Luke 1:31).

· The messenger is called ‘the prophet of the Most High’ (Luke 1:76), the Son is called ‘the Son of the Most High’ (Luke 1:32).

· The messenger is filled with the Holy Spirit after he is conceived (Luke 1:15), the Son is conceived by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35).

· The messenger comes to proclaim the One Who is coming, the Son comes in order to be the Coming One, the everlasting King.

· The messenger would be ‘great in the sight of the Lord’ (Luke 1:15), the Son would essentially be great (Luke 1:32), great in every way.

Excursus: The Question of ‘The Virgin Birth’.

We do not have time here to enter into a full discussion of this subject and those who are studying the Bible with the help of this commentary for devotional reasons may pass this note over. But for some for whom it may be a problem, because of the way in which the idea has been inflated, we would say a few words.

For eighteen hundred years there was no doubt about the exegesis of this passage except by those who approached it with their minds already made up, and with a determination to excise the idea of birth through a virgin. We must not read back modern scholarship to those attempts. And the only way in which it can now be interpreted in any other way is by excising the ‘inconvenient’ verses and phrases. But the trouble is that those verses and phrases are really inconvenient, for they are full of characteristic Lucan terminology. It is impossible to believe that an interpolater would make them so Lucan. And as we have seen they are part of a chiastic construction which forbids us to remove them. So it may well be argued that if they are rejected, it is not for sound scholastic reasons, but because they are inconvenient.

However, one point we must make before we continue is that these verses are speaking of something unique. They are not speaking of a ‘virgin birth’ is any sense understood elsewhere. They are not really dealing with ‘a virgin birth’ in any sense in which the term is used elsewhere, but with the supernatural way in which God brought Himself into the world as ‘made man’ through a virgin. It is never spoken of in Scripture as ‘the virgin birth’ as though that was somehow a central teaching. That He did it through a virgin was seen as necessary so that He might be called ‘holy’, for no ‘used’ channel could produce a ‘holy thing’. But this was not to speak of a ‘virgin birth’ like any of those others so often cited. Those were stories of intercourse between gods in the form of humans, and virgins who were humans (or between gods and goddesses, the latter far from true virgins). They were crude polytheistic stories intended to titillate men and illustrate the activities of the gods. They were not in any way even parallel to this sober account in Luke, and strictly speaking once the event had taken place the women in those stories were no longer virgins. There were also occasional references to the idea of a birth through ‘spiritual’ activity. But none that parallel the account here which is solidly based on Hebrew ideas.

Here in this account we read of a virgin who remained a virgin throughout. She underwent no sexual relations with either god or man. What she would experience would be the power of God at work upon her and within her. There was nothing sexual about it at all. It was a miracle of creation and incarnation. It was unique in the history of mankind, apart from the mooted possibility described in Isaiah 7:14. It was a ‘virgin birth’ only because she was a virgin, and a child was born.

The truth, of course, is that if we study the Scriptures we would expect ‘the Son of the Most High’ to be born of a virgin. When a beast was a firstling set apart for God it had not to be worked or sheared (Deuteronomy 15:19). When the Ark was carried into Jerusalem it was on ‘a new cart’ (2 Samuel 6:3 compare 1 Samuel 6:7). When Jesus rode into Jerusalem it was on a colt that had never been ridden (Luke 19:30). Thus the birth of the Son of the Most High had to be through a woman Who had never had relations with a man, as in Isaiah 7:14. No Jew would ever have doubted it.

And this had been prepared for by a number of ‘miraculous’ births of lesser mortals who were chosen by God from the womb. Thus apart from John the Baptiser himself we have Isaac (Genesis 17:17; Genesis 18:11-14), Samuel (1 Samuel 1:6; 1 Samuel 1:20) and Samson (Judges 13:2-3). But in all those cases a man had been involved. Here no man was involved. Jesus was greater than all.

However, the problem often raised is then as to why this birth was not described as such, or even mentioned, by Mark and John and Paul and Peter? We would not, of course, expect them to speak of a ‘virgin birth’, which would simply be careless and indicate a crude polytheistic idea to Gentiles unless very closely guarded and protected, but why do they give no hint as to what did happen here?

The answer, of course lies in the fact that they did give such a hint. Every passage that reveals the deity of Jesus demands this unique form of birth. No Jew could have seen it otherwise. Mark assumes it in his description of Jesus as the unique Son of God. John includes it when he speaks of the Word as the only begotten Son. Paul includes it when he speaks of the Son as having come forth from the Father, and as bearing the Name which is above every Name, the name of YHWH (LXX ‘LORD’). Peter includes it when he speaks of Jesus as ‘the LORD Jesus Christ’ (1 Peter 1:3) and refers to the Holy Spirit as ‘the Spirit of Christ’ (1 Peter 1:11) and to ‘our God and Saviour Jesus Christ’ (2 Peter 1:2). For not one of these would have conceived of God being made man through any other than a virgin. It would have been incompatible with Scripture. God could not have come into the world through a ‘used’ or tainted vehicle. Anything connected directly with God had to be unused and untainted. The very fact of having engaged in copulation would have been seen as connecting with sin, not because sex is a sin, but because it is the act of sinful man in producing a sinner. Sexual reproduction was always seen as tainted by sin. That is why sexual relations were seen as producing ‘uncleanness’, and abstinence from sexual relationships was often seen as a requirement for meeting with God (Exodus 19:15; 1 Samuel 21:5). Sexual relations would have been seen as defiling the channel through which the birth took place. All would have recognised that God could not come into the world through a defiled channel. It did not even need to be said.

And there was certainly good reason why they should not refer to ‘the virgin birth’ specifically. To do so would have been to put the emphasis in the wrong place, and to ask to have been misunderstood. No one wanted to put the emphasis on Mary when considering His birth, as the idea of the ‘virgin birth’ would have done. It is only the much later church that emphasised Mary in this way. The emphasis here was on God. Mary was certainly the source of His manhood. But what was important to the early church, who knew that Jesus was a man, was that this true man was also truly God. And both Matthew and Luke can only speak of the subject, which we describe as ‘a virgin birth’, because they do so carefully and in a way that is hedged around against misunderstanding. But neither speak of ‘a virgin birth’ in those words. They rather speak of God’s remarkable activity in and through a pure medium, a virgin. To have broached the subject in any other way would have invited the kind of response which they would have seen as blasphemous, and would therefore be seen as best avoided when it was not necessary. The actual birth story could not have been told without mentioning the fact that Mary was a virgin. But outside that to speak of it was unnecessary, for it was nowhere used as an arguing point in order to prove Who Jesus was, and had it been used in that way it would simply have invited ribald comment. But to all who knew and loved Him it would have been seen as being as obvious as the fact that God had created the world.

End of Excursus.