Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 60 · March 1
After the Angel Left
“And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.”
An empty room, a girl in it, and nothing to show anybody.
And the angel departed from her. That is the last clause of the scene, and Luke puts it directly after her yes. No further sign is recorded. Nobody else in Nazareth saw anything at all. Whatever she had, she had it on the strength of a conversation she could not prove had happened.
She had asked a question first. How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? Six months earlier, in the same chapter, a priest at the altar asked what sounds like the same question, Whereby shall I know this, and was struck dumb until the child was born. Luke never explains the difference between the two, and it is not that one of them stayed quiet.
Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. Handmaid is the feminine of bondservant, the lowest word on offer, and she chooses it for herself.
Lord, we would like the angel to stay. We say yes to things and then spend the following week hunting for evidence that the conversation was real, and we call the hunting faith. Give us her sentence instead. Be it unto us according to your word, in a house where nothing has visibly changed, on a morning when the only thing we are holding is what you said. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 60 is No Good Thing Lacking (Psalm 34:10).