A2 - Annunciations of John and of Jesus

LITERARY CHARACTER OF THE TEXTS

All four Gospels place the figure of John the Baptist at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and they reveal him as the one who prepared the way for Jesus. Saint Luke presents the connection between the two figures and their respective missions at an earlier stage, in a shared infancy narrative. Even in conception and birth, Jesus and John are linked together.

Before we consider the content of the texts, a brief word about their particular literary character is necessary. In their different ways, both Matthew and Luke closely link the events of Jesus’ childhood with Old Testament passages. Matthew demonstrates the connections for the reader each time by quoting the corresponding Old Testament text. Luke describes events using Old Testament language - making allusions that in individual cases could often seem coincidental and cannot always be proven, yet their overall effect on the fabric of the texts is unmistakable.

In Luke, there seems to be an underlying Hebrew text; at any rate, the whole account is marked by Semitisms, which are not otherwise typical of Luke. Attempts have been made to explain the particular character of these two chapters (Lk 1 - 2) in terms of a literary genre found in early Judaism: a Haggadic Midrash, that is to say, an exegesis of Scripture by means of narratives. The literary resemblance is beyond dispute. And yet it is clear that Luke’s infancy narrative is not a product of early Judaism, but belongs firmly to early Christianity.

There is more. A story is told here which interprets the Scriptures. And the converse is also true: what the Scriptures intended to say in many passages becomes visible only now through this new story. It is a story that is completely rooted in the word and yet only now does it supply the full meaning of that word, which hitherto could not be recognized. The story told here is no mere illustration of the ancient words: it is the reality to which they were referring. In those words alone it could not be recognized, but they now attain their full meaning through the event in which they come to pass.

If that is so, the question arises: how did Matthew and Luke come to know the story that they recount? What are their sources? As Joachim Gnilka rightly says, it is evidently a matter of family traditions. Luke indicates from time to time that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is herself one of his sources, especially when he says in 2:51 that “his mother kept all these things in her heart” (cf. also 2:19). Only she could report the event of the annunciation, for which there were no human witnesses.

Naturally, modern “critical” exegesis will tend to dismiss such connections as naive. But why should there not have been a tradition of this kind, preserved in the most intimate circle and theologically elaborated at the same time? Why should Luke have invented the statement about Mary keeping the words and events in her heart, if there were no concrete grounds for saying so? Why should he have spoken of her “pondering” over the words (Lk 2:19; cf. 1:29) if nothing was known of this?

I would add that the late emergence, particularly of the Marian traditions, can be similarly explained by the discretion of the Lord’s mother and of those around her: the sacred events of her early life could not be made public while she was still alive.

To sum up: what Matthew and Luke set out to do, each in his own way, was not to tell “stories” but to write history, real history that had actually happened, admittedly interpreted and understood in the context of the word of God. Hence the aim was not to produce an exhaustive account, but a record of what seemed important for the nascent faith community in the light of the word. The infancy narratives are interpreted history, condensed and written down in accordance with the interpretation.

There is a reciprocal relationship between the interpreting word of God and the interpreting history: the word of God teaches that “salvation history,” universal in scope, is present within the events. For their part, the events themselves unlock the word of God and manifest the true reality hidden within the individual texts.

The Old Testament contains some passages that are still, as it were, “stray.” Marius Reiser cites Is 53 as an example. One could relate the text to this or that figure, perhaps to Jeremiah. But the actual “owner” of the text keeps us waiting. Only when he appears does the passage acquire its full meaning. The same applies, as we shall see, to Is 7:14. This is another of the passages that, at the time of writing, were still waiting for the figure to whom they refer.

One of the characteristics of early Christian narrative is that it provides these “waiting” words with their “owner.” This connection between the “waiting” word and the recognition of its “owner,” now that he has appeared, has given rise to the typically Christian approach to exegesis, which is new and yet remains utterly faithful to the original words of Scripture.

THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE BIRTH OF JOHN

After these preliminary considerations, we now turn to the texts themselves. In the first instance, we are dealing here with two groups of narratives, different in character and yet quite closely related: the birth and childhood of John the Baptist and the annunciation that Mary would give birth to Jesus the Messiah.

The story of John has particularly deep Old Testament roots. Zechariah is a priest from the division of Abijah. His wife Elizabeth is also of priestly stock: she is from the tribe of Aaron (cf. Lk 1:5). According to Old Testament law, the service of priests is tied to membership of the tribe of the sons of Aaron and Levi. So John the Baptist is a priest. In him the priesthood of the Old Covenant moves toward Jesus; it becomes a pointer toward Jesus, a proclamation of his mission.

It strikes me as important that in John the whole Old Covenant priesthood becomes a prophecy of Jesus, and so - together with Psalm 118, the highest expression of its theology and spirituality - it points toward him, it makes itself his. A one-sided emphasis on the contrast between the Old Testament sacrificial cult and the spiritual worship of the New Covenant (cf. Rom 12:1) would obscure this connecting line, this inner dynamic of the Old Testament priesthood, which is a path toward Jesus Christ not only in John but earlier too, in the development of priestly spirituality expressed in Psalm 118.

The characterization of Zechariah and Elizabeth found in the following verse of Luke’s Gospel (1:6) likewise points toward the inner unity of the two testaments. It is said of both spouses that they were righteous before God, and that they walked blamelessly in all the commandments and precepts of the Lord. When we come to consider the figure of Saint Joseph we will look more closely at the term “righteous” or “just,” in which the whole piety of the Old Covenant is summed up. The “just” are those who inwardly live the ordinances of the law aright - those who walk their path in righteousness, according to the revealed will of God and open up space for new action by the Lord. In them, Old and New Covenant converge and combine to form a single history of God with men.

Zechariah enters the Temple; he enters the sacred space, while the people wait outside and pray. It is the hour of the evening sacrifice when he places incense on the burning coals. The fragrance of the rising incense is a symbol of prayer: “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice,” as we read in Ps 141:2. The Book of Revelation describes the heavenly liturgy in these terms: the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders were each “holding a harp, and … golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (5:8). At this hour, in which heavenly and earthly liturgies unite, there appears to the priest Zechariah “an angel of the Lord,” whose name is not yet indicated. He stands “on the right side of the altar of incense” (Lk 1:11). Erik Peterson describes the positioning as follows: “This was the south side of the altar. The angel stands between the altar and the seven-branched candlestick. On the left, the north side of the altar, stood the table with the bread-offerings” (Lukasevangelium, p. 22).

Place and time are holy: this new step in salvation history is in complete harmony with the ordinances of the divine Covenant of Sinai. In the Temple itself, during its liturgy, the new begins: the inner continuity of God’s dealings with men is very powerfully manifested. This corresponds to the ending of Saint Luke’s Gospel: as the Lord is about to ascend into heaven, he tells the disciples to return to Jerusalem, there to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and from there to bring the Gospel to the world (cf. Lk 24:49 - 53).

At the same time, we must note the difference between the annunciation of the birth of the Baptist to Zechariah and the annunciation of the birth of Jesus to Mary. Zechariah, father of the Baptist, is a priest and he receives the message in the Temple, during its liturgy. Mary’s lineage is not mentioned. The angel Gabriel is sent to her by God. He enters her house in Nazareth - a town unknown to the sacred Scriptures, a house that we must surely picture to ourselves as very humble and very simple. The contrast between the two scenes could not be greater: priest - Temple - liturgy on the one hand, an unknown young woman - an unknown small town - an unknown private dwelling on the other. The sign of the new Covenant is humility, hiddenness - the sign of the mustard-seed. The Son of God comes in lowliness. Both these elements belong together: the profound continuity in the history of God’s action and the radical newness of the hidden mustard-seed.

Let us return to Zechariah and the annunciation of the message of John the Baptist’s birth. It is not only the location that gives the promise an Old Covenant flavor. Everything said here, everything that happens here, is saturated in the words of sacred Scripture in the manner described above. It is only through these new events that the words acquire their full meaning - and vice versa: the events are of enduring significance because they proceed from the word, they are “fulfilled word.” Two groups of Old Testament texts come together here to form a new unity.

First of all, there is a group of stories about infertile parents receiving the promise of a son, who thus appears as a gift from God himself. The prime example is the annunciation of the birth of Isaac, heir to the promise that God had made to Abraham: “The Lord said, ‘I will surely return to you in the spring, and Sarah your wife shall have a son’ … Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself … The Lord said to Abraham, ‘Why did Sarah laugh? … Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ ” (Gen 18:10 - 14). Closely related to this is the story of the birth of Samuel. His mother Hannah was barren. On hearing her impassioned prayer, the priest Eli promised that God would grant her request. She became pregnant and consecrated her son Samuel to the Lord (cf. 1 Sam 1). So John belongs to a long line of offspring born to infertile parents through a miraculous intervention of God, for whom nothing is impossible. Because he comes from God in this special way, he belongs completely to God, and hence he also lives completely for men, in order to lead them to God.

When it is said of John that he “shall drink no wine nor strong drink” (Lk 1:15), this likewise aligns him within the priestly tradition. “Concerning the priests who are consecrated to God, it is said: ‘Drink no wine nor strong drink, you nor your sons with you, when you go into the tent of meeting, lest you die; it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations’ (Lev 10:9)” (Stöger, Das Evangelium nach Lukas, p. 31). John, who will be filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb (cf. Lk 1:15), lives permanently, as it were, “in the tent of meeting”: he is a priest not only at certain moments, but with his whole existence, and in this way he proclaims the new priesthood that will appear with Jesus.

In addition to this group of texts, which come from the historical books of the Old Testament, there are prophetic texts from the Books of Malachi and Daniel that shape the dialogue between the angel and Zechariah.

Let us hear Malachi first: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (3:23f.). “Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts” (3:1). John’s mission is interpreted in terms of the figure of Elijah. He is not to be identified with Elijah, but he comes in the spirit and power of the great prophet. To this extent, he does indeed fulfill through his mission the expectation that Elijah would return to purify the people of God and put it back on its feet, thus preparing it for the arrival of the Lord himself. So on the one hand John is placed in the category of the prophets, and yet at the same time he is raised above them, inasmuch as the returning Elijah prepares the way for the coming of God himself. So in these texts, the figure of Jesus and the coming of Jesus is tacitly identified with the coming of God himself. In Jesus it is the Lord who comes, in this way giving history its definitive direction.

The prophet Daniel is the second prophetic voice present in the background of our story. The Book of Daniel is the only one that mentions Gabriel by name. This great divine messenger appears to the prophet “at the time of the evening sacrifice” (9:21), to communicate a message about the future destiny of the chosen people. In response to Zechariah’s doubts, the divine messenger reveals himself as “Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God” (Lk 1:19).

In the Book of Daniel, the revelations communicated by Gabriel include the mysterious numerical indications about imminent hardships and the timing of the definitive salvation which it is the archangel’s principal task to announce, amid all the tribulations. Both Jewish and Christian thinkers have repeatedly grappled with these coded figures. Particular attention has been focused on the prophecy of the seventy weeks which “are decreed concerning your people and your holy city … to bring in everlasting righteousness” (9:24). René Laurentin has tried to show that Luke’s infancy narrative follows a precise chronology, according to which from the moment of the annunciation to Zechariah until the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, 490 days elapsed, that is to say seventy weeks of seven days each (cf. Structure et Théologie, pp. 49ff.). Whether Luke consciously adopted this chronology must remain an open question.

Be that as it may, in the account of the apparition of the archangel Gabriel at the hour of the evening sacrifice, we can surely see a reference to Daniel, a reference to the promise of everlasting righteousness entering time. In this way, the evangelist is saying to us: the time is fulfilled. The hidden event that takes place during Zechariah’s evening sacrifice, unnoticed by the vast world public, in reality ushers in the eschatological hour - the hour of salvation.

THE ANNUNCIATION TO MARY

“In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary” (Lk 1:26f.). In the first place, the annunciation of the birth of Jesus is linked chronologically with the story of John the Baptist by the reference to the time that has elapsed since the archangel Gabriel’s message to Zechariah, that is to say “in the sixth month” of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. The two events and the two missions are also linked in this passage by the indication that Mary and Elizabeth, and hence their offspring too, are blood relatives.

Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, made as a consequence of the dialogue between Gabriel and Mary (cf. Lk 1:36), occasions an encounter in the Holy Spirit between Jesus and John even before they are born, and this encounter at the same time makes visible the relationship between their respective missions: Jesus is the younger of the two, the one who comes later. But he is the one whose proximity causes John to leap in his mother’s womb and fills Elizabeth with the Holy Spirit (cf. Lk 1:41). So in Luke’s annunciation and nativity narratives, what the Baptist was to say in John’s Gospel is already objectively present: “This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, for he was before me’ ” (1:30).

Now, though, it is time to look more closely at the story of the annunciation to Mary of the birth of Jesus. First let us consider the angel’s message, then Mary’s answer.

A striking feature of the angel’s greeting is that he does not address Mary with the usual Hebrew salutation shalom - peace be with you - but with the Greek greeting formula chaire, which we might well translate with the word “Hail,” as in the Church’s Marian prayer, pieced together from the words of the annunciation narrative (cf. Lk 1:28, 42). Yet at this point it is only right to draw out the true meaning of the word chaire: rejoice! This exclamation from the angel - we could say - marks the true beginning of the New Testament.

The word reappears during the Holy Night on the lips of the angel who says to the shepherds: “I bring you good news of a great joy” (Lk 2:10). It appears again - in John’s Gospel - at the encounter with the risen Lord: “The disciples were glad when they saw the Lord” (20:20). Jesus’ farewell discourses in Saint John’s Gospel present a theology of joy, which as it were illuminates the depth of this word. “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (16:22).

Joy appears in these texts as the particular gift of the Holy Spirit, the true gift of the Redeemer. So a chord is sounded with the angel’s salutation which then resounds throughout the life of the Church. Its content is also present in the fundamental word that serves to designate the entire Christian message: Gospel - good news.

“Rejoice” - as we have seen - is in the first instance a Greek greeting, and to that extent this pronouncement by the angel immediately opens the door to the peoples of the world: the universality of the Christian message becomes evident. And yet this word is also taken from the Old Testament, and thus it expresses the complete continuity of biblical salvation history. Stanislas Lyonnet and René Laurentin in particular have shown that Gabriel’s greeting to Mary takes up and brings into the present the prophecy of Zeph 3:14 - 17: “Rejoice, daughter of Zion; shout, Israel … the King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst.”

There is no need here to enter into a detailed textual comparison between the angel’s greeting to Mary and Zephaniah’s prophecy. The essential reason for the daughter of Zion to rejoice is stated in the text itself: “the Lord is in your midst” (Zeph 3:15,17). Literally it says: “he is in your womb.” Here Zephaniah is alluding to a passage in the Book of Exodus which speaks of God dwelling in the ark of the Covenant as dwelling “in Israel’s womb” (cf. Laurentin, Structure et Théologie, pp. 70f., with reference to Ex 33:3 and 34:9). This same word reappears in Gabriel’s message to Mary: “you will conceive in your womb” (Lk 1:31).

Whatever view is taken regarding the details of these parallels, there is clearly an inner resemblance between the two messages. Mary appears as the daughter of Zion in person. The Zion prophecies are fulfilled in her in an unexpected way. Mary becomes the Ark of the Covenant, the place where the Lord truly dwells.

“Rejoice, full of grace!” One further aspect of the greeting chaire is worthy of note: the connection between joy and grace. In Greek, the two words joy and grace (chará and cháris) are derived from the same root. Joy and grace belong together.

Let us turn now to the content of the promise. Mary is to bear a child, to whom the angel assigns the titles “Son of the Most High” and “Son of God.” Moreover, it is promised that God, the Lord, will give him the throne of his father David. He will rule over the house of Jacob for ever, and his kingdom (his reign) will have no end. Then comes a series of promises, which reveal how the conception is to take place. “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” (Lk 1:35).

Let us begin with this final element. In terms of the language used, it belongs to the theology of the Temple and of God’s presence in the sanctuary. The sacred cloud - the shekinah - is the visible sign of God’s presence. It conceals the fact that God is dwelling in his house, yet at the same time points to it. The cloud that casts its shadow over men comes back later in the account of the Lord’s transfiguration (cf. Lk 9:34; Mk 9:7). Again it is a sign of God’s presence, of God’s self-revelation in hiddenness. So the reference to the overshadowing by the Holy Spirit brings us back to the Zion theology of the salutation. Once again Mary appears as God’s living tent, in which he chooses to dwell among men in a new way.

At the same time, the mystery of the Triune God is evoked in the course of this annunciation message. It is God the Father who acts, promising that David’s throne will endure and now appointing the heir whose kingdom will have no end - David’s definitive heir, whom the prophet Nathan had foretold with the words: “I will be his father, and he shall be my son” (2 Sam 7:14). Psalm 2 takes up the same idea: “You are my son, today I have begotten you” (v. 7).

The angel’s words remain entirely within the realm of Old Testament piety, and yet they transcend it. In the light of this new situation, they take on a new realism, a hitherto unforeseeable depth and strength. At this stage, the Trinitarian mystery has not yet been thought through, it has not been worked into a definitive teaching. It appears spontaneously in and through God’s way of acting, as prefigured in the Old Testament; it appears within the event, without at this stage becoming a doctrine. Similarly, the sonship of the child is not thought through in metaphysical terms. Everything remains within the realm of Jewish piety. Yet the ancient words take on a new life; they transcend themselves on account of the new event that they express and interpret. In their very simplicity, they acquire an almost disturbing new loftiness, which can develop further only in the path of Jesus and in the path of the believer.

In this context, too, we encounter the name “Jesus,” which the angel assigns to the promised child both in Luke (1:31) and in Matthew (1:21). Concealed within the name of Jesus is the tetragrammaton, the mysterious name from Mount Horeb, here expanded into the statement: God saves. The, as it were, “incomplete” name from Sinai is finally spoken. The God who is, is the saving God, now present. The revelation of God’s name, which began in the burning bush, comes to completion in Jesus (cf. Jn 17:26).

The redemption brought by the promised child would be manifested in the definitive establishment of David’s kingship. Permanence had indeed been promised to the Davidic kingdom: “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me; your throne shall be established for ever” (2 Sam 7:16), as Nathan had proclaimed at God’s own behest.

Psalm 89 reflects in a disturbing way the contradiction between the definitive nature of the promise and the historical reality of the collapse of David’s kingship: “I will establish his line for ever, and his throne as the days of the heavens. If his children forsake my law … then I will punish their transgression with the rod … but I will not remove from him my steadfast love, or be false to my faithfulness” (vv. 30 - 34). With these words the psalmist movingly and insistently repeats that promise back to God, he knocks at God’s heart and implores his faithfulness. For the reality he now experiences is quite different: “but now you have cast off and rejected, you are full of wrath against your anointed, you have renounced the covenant with your servant, you have defiled his crown in the dust … all that pass by despoil him, he has become the scorn of his neighbours … remember, O Lord, how your servant is scorned!” (vv. 39 - 42, 51).

This lament by Israel was also present to God at the moment when Gabriel was announcing to the Virgin Mary the new king who would sit on David’s throne. Herod was king by favor of Rome. He was an Idumaean, not a son of David. But more than anything else it was his appalling cruelty that made him such a caricature of the kingship that had been promised to David. The angel announces that God has not forgotten his promise; that it is to come true now in the child that Mary will conceive through the Holy Spirit. “His kingdom will have no end,” says Gabriel to Mary.

In the fourth century this phrase was incorporated into the Nicene Creed - at a time when the kingship of Jesus of Nazareth already spanned the entire Mediterranean region. We Christians know and gratefully acknowledge that God did indeed carry out his promise. The kingship of Jesus, Son of David, stretches “from sea to sea,” from continent to continent, from one century to another.

Admittedly, Jesus’ words to Pilate also remain perennially true: “My kingship is not of this world” (Jn 18:36). In the course of history, the mighty of this world have sometimes tried to align it with their own, and that is when it is put at risk: they seek to link their power with Jesus’ power, and in the process they disfigure his kingdom and endanger it. Or else it is subjected to constant persecution by rulers who will tolerate no other kingdom than their own, and would like to destroy this powerless king, whose mysterious power they still fear.

Yet “his kingdom will have no end”: this unique kingdom is not built on worldly power, but is founded on faith and love alone. It is the great force of hope in the midst of a world that so often seems abandoned by God. The kingdom of Jesus, Son of David, knows no end because in him God himself is reigning, in him God’s kingdom erupts into this world. The promise that Gabriel spoke to the Virgin Mary is true. It is fulfilled ever anew.

Mary’s response, which we will consider now, unfolds in three steps. To begin with, in reaction to the angel’s greeting she is troubled and pensive. Her reaction is different from Zechariah’s. Of him it is said that he was troubled and “fear fell upon him” (Lk 1:12). In Mary’s case the first word is the same (she was troubled), but what follows is not fear but an interior reflection on the angel’s greeting. She ponders (dialogues within herself) over what the greeting of God’s messenger could mean. So one salient feature of the image of the mother of Jesus is already present here, and we will encounter it again in two similar situations in the Gospel: her inner engagement with the word (cf. Lk 2:19, 51).

She does not remain locked in her initial troubled state at the proximity of God in his angel, but she seeks to understand. So Mary appears as a fearless woman, one who remains composed even in the presence of something utterly unprecedented. At the same time she stands before us as a woman of great interiority, who holds heart and mind in harmony and seeks to understand the context, the overall significance of God’s message. In this way, she becomes an image of the Church as she considers the word of God, tries to understand it in its entirety and guards in her memory the things that have been given to her.

Mary’s second reaction is somewhat puzzling for us. After the thoughtful reflection with which she had received his initial greeting, the angel informs her that she has been chosen to be the mother of the Messiah. Mary replies with a short, incisive question: “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” (Lk 1:34).

Let us consider again the difference between this response and the reaction of Zechariah, who doubted the possibility of the task announced to him. Like Elizabeth, he was advanced in years: he could no longer hope for a son. Mary, on the other hand, does not doubt. She asks not whether, but how the promise is to be fulfilled, as she cannot recognize any way it could happen: “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” (Lk 1:34). This question seems unintelligible to us, because Mary was betrothed, which meant that, according to Jewish law, she was already effectively a married woman, even if she did not yet live with her husband and they had not yet begun their conjugal life.

Since Saint Augustine, one explanation that has been put forward is that Mary had taken a vow of virginity and had entered into the betrothal simply in order to have a protector for her virginity. But this theory is quite foreign to the world of the Judaism of Jesus’ time, and in that context it seems inconceivable. So how are we to understand the passage? A satisfying answer has yet to be found by modern exegesis. Some say that at this point, having not yet been taken into the marital home, Mary had had no dealings with men, yet she saw the task as immediately pressing. But this fails to convince, as the time when she would be taken into the marital home could not have been far off. Other exegetes have wanted to view the saying as a purely literary construction, designed to continue the dialogue between Mary and the angel. Yet this is no real explanation of the saying either. Another element to keep in mind is that according to Jewish custom, betrothal was unilaterally pronounced by the man, and the woman was not invited to express her consent. Yet this does not solve the problem either.

So the riddle remains - or perhaps one should say the mystery - of this saying. Mary sees no way, for reasons that are beyond our grasp, that she could become mother of the Messiah through marital relations. The angel confirms that her motherhood will not come about in the normal way after she has been taken home by Joseph, but through “overshadowing, by the power of the Most High,” by the coming of the Holy Spirit, and he notes emphatically: “For with God nothing will be impossible” (Lk 1:37).

Next comes the third reaction, Mary’s actual answer: her straightforward yes. She declares herself to be the handmaid of the Lord. “Let it be to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38).

In one of his Advent homilies, Bernard of Clairvaux offers a stirring presentation of the drama of this moment. After the error of our first parents, the whole world was shrouded in darkness, under the dominion of death. Now God seeks to enter the world anew. He knocks at Mary’s door. He needs human freedom. The only way he can redeem man, who was created free, is by means of a free “yes” to his will. In creating freedom, he made himself in a certain sense dependent upon man. His power is tied to the unenforceable “yes” of a human being. So Bernard portrays heaven and earth as it were holding its breath at this moment of the question addressed to Mary. Will she say yes? She hesitates … will her humility hold her back? Just this once - Bernard tells her - do not be humble but daring! Give us your “yes”! This is the crucial moment when, from her lips, from her heart, the answer comes: “Let it be to me according to your word.” It is the moment of free, humble yet magnanimous obedience in which the loftiest choice of human freedom is made.

Mary becomes a mother through her “yes.” The Church Fathers sometimes expressed this by saying that Mary conceived through her ear - that is to say: through her hearing. Through her obedience, the Word entered into her and became fruitful in her. In this connection, the Fathers developed the idea of God’s birth in us through faith and baptism, in which the Lógos comes to us ever anew, making us God’s children. For example, we may recall the words of Saint Irenaeus: “How shall man pass into God, unless God has first passed into man? How was mankind to escape this birth into death, unless he were born again through faith, by that new birth from the Virgin, the sign of salvation that is God’s wonderful and unmistakable gift?” (Adv. Haer. IV 33,4; cf. H. Rahner, Our Lady and the Church, p. 60).

I consider it important to focus also on the final sentence of Luke’s annunciation narrative: “And the angel departed from her” (Lk 1:38). The great hour of Mary’s encounter with God’s messenger - in which her whole life is changed - comes to an end, and she remains there alone, with the task that truly surpasses all human capacity. There are no angels standing round her. She must continue along the path that leads through many dark moments - from Joseph’s dismay at her pregnancy to the moment when Jesus is said to be out of his mind (cf. Mk 3:21; Jn 10:20), right up to the night of the Cross.

How often in these situations must Mary have returned inwardly to the hour when God’s angel had spoken to her, pondering afresh the greeting: “Rejoice, full of grace!” and the consoling words: “Do not be afraid!” The angel departs; her mission remains, and with it matures her inner closeness to God, a closeness that in her heart she is able to see and touch.

THE CONCEPTION AND BIRTH OF JESUS ACCORDING TO MATTHEW

After considering Luke’s annunciation narrative, we must now turn our attention to the tradition handed down in Matthew’s Gospel regarding the same event. In contrast to Luke, Matthew relates it exclusively from the perspective of Saint Joseph, who as a descendant of David represents the link between the figure of Jesus and the Davidic promise.

Matthew begins by telling us that Mary was betrothed to Joseph. According to the prevailing Jewish law, betrothal already established a juridical bond between the two parties, so that Mary could be called Joseph’s wife, even though he had not yet taken her into his home - the step which established the married state. While betrothed, “the woman still lived in her parents’ home and remained under the patria potestas. After a year, her husband would take her into his home, thereby sealing the marriage” (Gnilka, Das Matthäusevangelium, p. 17). Now Joseph had to come to terms with the fact that Mary “was with child of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 1:18).

With regard to the child’s origin, Matthew is anticipating something here that Joseph does not yet know. Joseph has to assume that Mary has broken their engagement, and according to the law he must dismiss her. He has a choice between a public juridical act and a private form. He can bring Mary before the court or he can issue her with a private writ of divorce. Joseph decides on the latter option, in order not “to put her to shame” (1:19). Matthew sees in this choice an indication that Joseph was “a just man.”

The designation of Joseph as a just man (zaddik) extends far beyond the decision he takes at this moment: it gives an overall picture of Saint Joseph and at the same time it aligns him with the great figures of the Old Covenant - beginning with Abraham, the just. If we may say that the form of piety found in the New Testament can be summed up in the expression “a believer,” then the Old Testament idea of a whole life lived according to sacred Scripture is summed up in the idea of “a just man.”

Psalm 1 presents the classic image of the “just” man. We might well think of it as a portrait of the spiritual figure of Saint Joseph. A just man, it tells us, is one who maintains living contact with the word of God, who “delights in the law of the Lord” (v. 2). He is like a tree, planted beside the flowing waters, constantly bringing forth fruit. The flowing waters, from which he draws nourishment, naturally refer to the living word of God, into which he sinks the roots of his being. God’s will is not a law imposed on him from without, it is “joy.” For him the law is simply Gospel, good news, because he reads it with a personal, loving openness to God and in this way learns to understand and live it from deep within.

If Psalm 1 sees it as the mark of the just man, the “happy man,” that he lives by the Torah, the word of God, the parallel passage in Jer 17:7 calls “blessed” the one “who puts his trust in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord.” This text brings out more strongly than the psalm the personal character of righteousness - the trust in God that gives man hope. Although neither passage speaks explicitly of the “just” but rather of the “happy” or the “blessed,” we may still regard them, with Hans-Joachim Kraus, as providing the authentic Old Testament image of the just man, and so we can learn from them what Matthew means when he describes Saint Joseph as “just.”

This image of the man with roots in the living waters of God’s word, whose life is spent in dialogue with God and who therefore brings forth constant fruit - this image becomes concrete in the event recounted here, as well as in everything we are subsequently told about Joseph of Nazareth. After the discovery that Joseph made, his task was to interpret and apply the law correctly. He does so with love: he does not want to give Mary up to public shame. He wishes her well, even in the hour of his great disappointment. He does not embody the form of externalized legal-ism that Jesus denounces in Mt 23 and that Paul opposes so strenuously. He lives the law as Gospel. He seeks the path that brings law and love into a unity. And so he is inwardly prepared for the new, unexpected and humanly speaking incredible news that comes to him from God.

Whereas the angel “came” to Mary (Lk 1:28), he merely appears to Joseph in a dream - admittedly a dream that is real and reveals what is real. Once again this shows us an essential quality of the figure of Saint Joseph: his capacity to perceive the divine and his ability to discern. Only a man who is inwardly watchful for the divine, only someone with a real sensitivity for God and his ways, can receive God’s message in this way. And an ability to discern was necessary in order to know whether it was simply a dream or whether God’s messenger had truly appeared to him and addressed him.

The message conveyed to Joseph is overwhelming, and it demands extraordinarily courageous faith. Can it be that God has really spoken, that what Joseph was told in the dream was the truth - a truth so far surpassing anything he could have foreseen? Can it be that God has acted in this way toward a human creature? Can it be that God has now launched a new history with men? Matthew has already said that Joseph “inwardly considered” (enthym?théntos) the right way to respond to Mary’s pregnancy. So we can well imagine his inner struggle now to make sense of this breathtaking dream-message: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 1:20).

Joseph is explicitly addressed as son of David, which also serves to indicate the task assigned to him in this event: as heir to the Davidic promise, he is to bear witness to God’s faithfulness. “Do not be afraid” to take on this task, one that might well arouse fear. “Do not be afraid” - the very words that the angel of the annunciation had spoken to Mary. By means of this same exhortation from the angel, Joseph is now drawn into the mystery of God’s incarnation.

After the message about the child’s conception through the power of the Holy Spirit, Joseph is entrusted with a further task: “Mary will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Mt 1:21). Together with the instruction to take Mary as his wife, Joseph is asked to give a name to the child and thus legally to adopt it as his. It is the same name that the angel indicated to Mary as the name of the child: Jesus. The name Jesus (Jeshua) means “YHWH is salvation.” The divine messenger who spoke to Joseph in the dream explains the nature of this salvation: “He will save his people from their sins.”

On the one hand, then, a lofty theological task is assigned to the child, for only God can forgive sins. So this child is immediately associated with God, directly linked with God’s holy and saving power. On the other hand, though, this definition of the Messiah’s mission could also appear disappointing. The prevailing expectations of salvation were primarily focused upon Israel’s concrete sufferings - on the reestablishment of the Davidic kingdom, on Israel’s freedom and independence, and naturally that included material prosperity for this largely impoverished people. The promise of forgiveness of sins seems both too little and too much: too much, because it trespasses upon God’s exclusive sphere; too little, because there seems to be no thought of Israel’s concrete suffering or its true need for salvation.

So this passage already anticipates the whole debate over Jesus’ Messiahship: has he now redeemed Israel, or is everything still as it was before? Is the mission, as lived by Jesus, the answer to the promise, or is it not? Certainly it does not match the immediate expectations of Messianic salvation nurtured by men who felt oppressed not so much by their sins as by their sufferings, their lack of freedom, the wretched conditions of their existence.

Jesus himself poignantly raised the question as to where the priority lies in man’s need for redemption on the occasion when the four men, who could not carry the paralytic through the door because of the crowd, let him down from the roof and laid him at Jesus’ feet. The sick man’s very existence was a plea, an urgent appeal for salvation, to which Jesus responded in a way that was quite contrary to the expectation of the bearers and of the sick man himself, saying: “My son, your sins are forgiven” (Mk 2:5). This was the last thing anyone was expecting. This was the last thing they were concerned about. The paralytic needed to be able to walk, not to be delivered from his sins. The scribes criticized the theological presumption of Jesus’ words: the sick man and those around him were disappointed, because Jesus had apparently overlooked the man’s real need.

I consider this whole scene to be of key significance for the question of Jesus’ mission, in the terms with which it was first described in the angel’s message to Joseph. In the passage concerned, both the criticism of the scribes and the silent expectation of the onlookers is acknowledged. Jesus then demonstrates his ability to forgive sins by ordering the sick man to take up his pallet and walk away healed. At the same time, the priority of forgiveness for sins as the foundation of all true healing is clearly maintained.

Man is a relational being. And if his first, fundamental relationship is disturbed - his relationship with God - then nothing else can be truly in order. This is where the priority lies in Jesus’ message and ministry: before all else, he wants to point man toward the essence of his malady, and to show him - if you are not healed there, then however many good things you may find, you are not truly healed.

In this sense, the explanation of Jesus’ name that was offered to Joseph in his dream already contains a fundamental clarification of how man’s salvation has to be understood and hence what the Saviour’s essential task must be.

After the angel’s annunciation to Joseph of the virginal conception and birth of Jesus, Matthew adds two further statements that complete his narrative.

First he shows that these happenings had been foretold by the Scriptures. This is a characteristic feature of his Gospel: for all essential events, to adduce a “proof from Scripture” - to make it clear that the words of Scripture anticipate these events and inwardly prepare the way for them. Matthew demonstrates that the ancient words come true in the story of Jesus. But at the same time he shows that the story of Jesus is true: that is to say, it proceeds from the word of God, by which it is sustained and brought about.

After the Scriptural quotation, Matthew brings the story to a close. He recounts that Joseph awoke from sleep and did as the angel of the Lord had instructed him. He took Mary home as his wife, but did not “know” her until she had given birth to the Son. This underlines once more that the Son is begotten not from him but from the Holy Spirit. Finally the evangelist adds: “He called his name Jesus” (Mt 1:25).

Once again Joseph is presented to us, in quite practical terms, as a “just” man: his inner watchfulness for God, which enables him to receive and understand the message, leads quite spontaneously to obedience. Even if hitherto he had puzzled over his various options, now he knows what the right course of action is. Being a just man he follows God’s commands, as Psalm 1 says.

At this point, we must examine the proof from Scripture that Matthew presents, which has become the object (how could it be otherwise?) of extensive exegetical debate. The verse is as follows: “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel,’ which means, God with us” (Mt 1:22f.; cf. Is 7:14). This prophetic saying, which Matthew makes into one of the key Christological statements, we will first attempt to understand in its original historical context, and then we will try to see how the mystery of Jesus Christ is reflected in it.

Exceptionally, we are able to date this verse from Isaiah quite precisely. It comes from the year 733 B.C. The Assyrian King Tiglat-Pileser III had quashed the beginnings of an uprising by the Syro-Palestinian states by means of a surprise campaign. King Rezin of Damascus/Syria and King Pekah of Israel then formed a coalition against the great Assyrian power. Since they could not persuade King Ahaz of Judah to enter their alliance, they decided to take to the field against the Jerusalem king, in order to force his country into their coalition.

Understandably, Ahaz and his people were fearful in the face of the enemy alliance; the heart of the king and his people trembled “as the trees of the forest shake before the wind” (Is 7:2). Nevertheless Ahaz, who was evidently a clever and coldly calculating politician, maintained his previous line: he did not want to enter an anti-Assyrian alliance, which he evidently thought had no chance of success in view of the vast superiority of the superpower. Instead, he concluded a protection treaty with Assyria, which on the one hand guaranteed him security and saved his country from destruction, but on the other hand demanded, as a price, the worship of the protecting power’s national gods.

After Ahaz had concluded the treaty with Assyria, despite Isaiah’s warnings, an altar was indeed built on the Assyrian model in the Temple at Jerusalem (cf. 2 Kings 16:11ff.; cf. Kaiser, Isaiah 1 - 12, p. 149n.). At the time of the episode related in the Isaiah passage that Matthew quotes, this had yet to happen. But it was clear that if Ahaz was going to conclude this treaty with the great king of Assyria, it meant that as a politician he trusted more in the power of the king than in the power of God, which evidently did not strike him as sufficiently real. So what was at stake here was ultimately not a political problem, but a question of faith.

Isaiah tells the king that he need not fear the two “smoldering stumps of firebrands,” Syria and Israel (Ephraim), and that there is therefore no reason for the protection treaty with Assyria: he should rely on faith, not on political calculations. Quite unconventionally, he invites Ahaz to request a sign from God, from the underworld or from the heights. The answer given by the king of Judah appears pious: he will not put God to the test and he will not ask for a sign (cf. Is 7:10 - 12). The prophet, speaking as God’s mouthpiece, is not deterred. He knows that the king’s refusal of the sign is not, as it appears, an expression of faith, but on the contrary an indication that he does not want to be disturbed in his Realpolitik.

So now the prophet declares that the Lord himself will give a sign: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel” (God with us - Is 7:14).

What is the sign promised to Ahaz in this passage? Matthew, and with him the entire Christian tradition, sees in it a prophecy of the birth of Jesus from the Virgin Mary: even though Jesus is not actually named Emmanuel, nevertheless he is Emmanuel, as the entire history of the Gospels seeks to demonstrate. This man - they tell us - in his very person is God’s being-with-men. He is true man and at the same time God, God’s true Son.

But is that how Isaiah understood the prophetic sign? Against this it is rightly objected, in the first place, that the sign announced to Ahaz was intended for him there and then, and was meant to stir him to faith in the God of Israel as the true ruler of the world. So the sign would need to be sought and identified within the historical context in which it was announced by the prophet. Exegesis has therefore searched meticulously, using all the resources of historical scholarship, for a contemporary interpretation - and it has failed.

Rudolf Kilian, in his commentary on Isaiah, briefly describes the essential attempts that have been made. He speaks of four principal types of interpretation. The first is this: “Emmanuel” refers to the Messiah. Yet the idea of the Messiah only reached its fully developed form at the time of the Exile and thereafter. Here at most we could be dealing with an anticipation of this figure: there is nothing contemporary with Isaiah that might correspond to it. The second hypothesis assumes that the “God with us” is a son of King Ahaz, perhaps Hezekiah - a thesis that simply does not add up. The third theory suggests that it refers to one of the sons of the prophet Isaiah, both of whom have prophetic names (Shear-jashub: “a remnant shall return” and Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz: “the spoil speeds, the prey hastens”; cf. Is 7:3; 8:3), but this attempt does not add up either. A fourth thesis argues for a collective interpretation: Emmanuel as the new Israel, and the ’almãh (“virgin”) as “none other than the symbolic figure of Zion.” But the context of the prophet in no way points toward a notion of this kind, and in any event, such a sign could not be historically contemporary. Kilian concludes his analysis of the various exegetical approaches as follows: “As a result of this overview it turns out that no single attempt at interpretation is entirely convincing. The mother and child remain a mystery, at least to the modern reader, but probably also to the contemporary audience, perhaps even to the prophet himself” (Jesaja 1 - 12, p. 62).

So what are we to say? The passage about the virgin who gives birth to Emmanuel, like the great Suffering Servant song in Is 53, is a word in waiting. There is nothing in its own historical context to correspond to it. So it remains an open question: it is addressed not merely to Ahaz. Nor is it addressed merely to Israel. It is addressed to humanity. The sign that God himself announces is given not for a specific political situation, but it concerns the whole history of humanity.

Should Christians not hear this word as their own? On listening to this verse, should they not come to the conviction that the message which always seemed so strange, waiting to be deciphered, has now come true? Should they not be convinced that God has now given us this sign in the birth of Jesus from the Virgin Mary? Emmanuel has come. Marius Reiser has summed up the way Christian readers have experienced this passage as follows: “The prophet’s prediction is like a miraculously formed keyhole, into which the key of Christ fits perfectly” (Bibelkritik, p. 328).

Indeed, I believe that in our own day, after all the efforts of critical exegesis, we can share anew this sense of astonishment at the fact that a saying from the year 733 B.C., incomprehensible for so long, came true at the moment of the conception of Jesus Christ - that God did indeed give us a great sign intended for the whole world.

VIRGIN BIRTH - MYTH OR HISTORICAL TRUTH?

Finally we must ask in all seriousness: when the evangelists Matthew and Luke tell us, in their different ways and following different traditions, about Jesus’ conception from the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, is this a historical reality, a real historical event, or is it a pious legend, which seeks to express and interpret the mystery of Jesus in its own way?

Especially since Eduard Norden († 1941) and Martin Dibelius († 1947), attempts have been made to explain the account of Jesus’ virgin birth in terms of the history of religions, and the stories of the conception and birth of the Egyptian Pharaohs seem to have been hailed as a particularly important discovery in this regard. A second set of related ideas has been identified in early Judaism, again in Egypt, in the writings of Philo of Alexandria († after 40 A.D.). The two sets of ideas are nevertheless very different from one another. The narrative of the divine generation of the Pharaohs, which involves the deity physically approaching the mother, is ultimately about giving theological legitimacy to the cult of the ruler, it is a political theology that seeks to raise the king into the realm of the divine and thus to legitimize his divine claims. Philo’s account of the generation of the sons of the patriarchs from divine seed, on the other hand, is allegorical in character. “The wives of the patriarchs … become allegories for the virtues. As such they become pregnant from God, and they give birth for their husbands to the virtues that they themselves embody” (Gnilka, Das Matthäusevangelium, p. 25). It is hard to know to what extent, over and above allegory, any concrete interpretation is intended.

On careful reading, it is clear that neither case offers a real parallel to the account of Jesus’ virgin birth. The same applies to texts from the Graeco-Roman world, which some have wanted to cite as pagan models for the story of Jesus’ conception through the Holy Spirit: the liaison between Zeus and Alcmene that led to the birth of Heracles, or that between Zeus and Danaë, from which Perseus was born, and so on.

The difference between the concepts involved is so profound that one really cannot speak of true parallels. In the Gospel accounts, the oneness of the one God and the infinite distance between God and creature is fully preserved. There is no mixture, no demi-god. It is God’s creative word alone that brings about something new. Jesus, born of Mary, is fully man and fully God, without confusion and without separation, as the creed of Chalcedon in the year 451 was to clarify.

The accounts of Matthew and Luke are not myths taken a stage further. They are firmly rooted, in terms of their basic conception, in the biblical tradition of God the Creator and Redeemer. As far as their specific content is concerned, though, they are derived from the family tradition, they are a tradition handed down, recording the events that took place.

I tend to regard as the one true explanation of these stories something that Joachim Gnilka, following Gerhard Delling, expressed as a question: “Might the mystery surrounding the birth of Jesus … be a later addition prefixed to the Gospel, or does it not rather serve to indicate that the mystery was already known? It is just that there was a desire not to say too much about it, or to reduce it to an event like any other” (Das Matthäusevangelium, p. 30).

It seems natural to me that only after Mary’s death could the mystery be made public and pass into the shared patrimony of early Christianity. At that point it could find its way into the evolving complex of Christological doctrine and be linked to the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God - yet not in the manner of a story crafted from an idea, an idea reformulated as a fact, but vice versa: the event itself, a fact that was now in the public domain, became the object of reflection - understanding was sought. The overall picture of Jesus Christ shed light upon the event, and conversely, through that event, the divine logic was more deeply grasped. The mystery of his origin illuminated what came later, and conversely the developed form of Christological faith helped to make sense of that origin. Thus did Christology develop.

Perhaps it is appropriate at this point to mention a text which from earliest times has fascinated Western Christianity as a possible intuition of the mystery of the virgin birth. I am thinking of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue from his poetic cycle Bucolics (Pastoral Poems), written about forty years before the birth of Jesus. In among these playful verses on rural life, suddenly a very different tone is sounded: the birth of a new great world order from that which is “undefiled” (ab integro) is proclaimed. “Iam redit et virgo - now the virgin returns.” A new generation descends from heaven on high. A boy is born, with whom the “iron” brood ends.

What is being promised here? Who is the virgin? Who is the boy that is spoken of? Here too, as in the case of Is 7:14, scholars have tried to make historical identifications, which have likewise run into difficulties. So what is being said? The overall conceptual framework comes from the worldview of antiquity: in the background is the doctrine of the cycles of the aeons and the force of destiny. But these ancient concepts take on a fresh contemporary aspect with the expectation that the time has now come for a great new aeon to begin. What had hitherto been only a remote prediction suddenly moves into the present. In the age of Augustus, after the great upheavals of war and civil strife, a wave of hope surges through the land: now at last a great period of peace, a new world order, seems about to dawn.

Linked to this sense of change in the air is the figure of the virgin, the image of the pure, undefiled one, the fresh start ab integro. So too is the expectation of the boy, the “offspring of the gods” (deum suboles). Hence, one could say that the figures of the virgin and the divine child belong in some sense to the archetypal images of human hope, which emerge at times of crisis and expectation, even without there being any concrete figures in view.

Let us return to the biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus from the Virgin Mary, who had conceived the child by the Holy Spirit. Is it true? Or is it possible that archetypal concepts have been transferred onto the figures of Jesus and his mother?

Anyone who reads the biblical accounts and compares them to the related traditions mentioned above will immediately notice the profound difference. Not only the comparison with Egyptian models, of which we have spoken, but also the dream of hope that we encountered in Virgil point toward very different worlds.

In Matthew and Luke there is no trace of a cosmic revolution, nor is there any physical encounter between God and human beings: what we read there is an utterly humble story, yet one whose very humility gives it a disturbing grandeur. It is Mary’s obedience that opens the door to God. God’s word, his Spirit, creates the child in her. He does so through the door of her obedience. In this way, Jesus is the new Adam, the new beginning ab integro - from the Virgin, who places herself entirely at the disposal of God’s will. So a new creation comes about, which is nevertheless tied to the free “yes” of the human creature, Mary.

Perhaps one could say that humanity’s silent and confused dreams of a new beginning came true in this event - in a reality such that only God could create.

Is what we profess in the Creed true, then? - “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God … [who] by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary”?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. Karl Barth pointed out that there are two moments in the story of Jesus when God intervenes directly in the material world: the virgin birth and the resurrection from the tomb, in which Jesus did not remain, nor see corruption. These two moments are a scandal to the modern spirit. God is “allowed” to act in ideas and thoughts, in the spiritual domain - but not in the material. That is shocking. He does not belong there. But that is precisely the point: God is God and he does not operate merely on the level of ideas. In that sense, what is at stake in both of these moments is God’s very godhead. The question that they raise is: does matter also belong to him?

Naturally we may not ascribe to God anything nonsensical or irrational, or anything that contradicts his creation. But here we are not dealing with the irrational or contradictory, but precisely with the positive - with God’s creative power, embracing the whole of being. In that sense these two moments - the virgin birth and the real resurrection from the tomb - are the cornerstones of faith. If God does not also have power over matter, then he simply is not God. But he does have this power, and through the conception and resurrection of Jesus Christ he has ushered in a new creation. So as the Creator he is also our Redeemer. Hence the conception and birth of Jesus from the Virgin Mary is a fundamental element of our faith and a radiant sign of hope.