Do You Believe in the Virgin?
Do You Believe in the Virgin? by Rev. L. John Gable
December 23, 2018
“Do you believe in the Virgin?” That’s all she asked him, and then she waited for his answer.
Years ago I had a young friend, I’ll call him Tony, who met and fell in love with a woman from Spain I’ll call Maria. They became engaged and began making wedding plans, but Tony had yet to meet Maria’s extended family, which of course he had to do, so they made the long trip over to meet them. As he was being introduced around the large circle of parents and siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, they finally came to Maria’s grandmother who signaled for Tony to lean forward and come a little closer, indicating that she had a question to ask him, and this is what she asked, “Do you believe in the Virgin?”
Needless to say, it caught him off guard, because he didn’t really know what she was asking. Knowing she was a devout Catholic, was she asking a theological question? Or was she asking about his past experiences or about his relationship with her granddaughter? He found himself in a momentary quandary, not being sure exactly how to answer this unexpected question.
Today the same question is posed to us. The ancient prophecy of Isaiah concerning the birth of the Messiah says, “The Lord Himself will give you a sign. Look the virgin (the Hebrew word is most frequently translated “the young woman”) is with child and shall bear a son and shall call Him Immanuel (which means ‘God with us’).” In the Gospel of Luke we read, “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin…whose name was Mary.” These passages speak of the way Jesus’ birth fulfills the ancient prophecy regarding the coming of the promised Messiah of God and they form the basis for our confession of faith that Jesus Christ was “conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.”
Now this may be the testimony of Scripture and the historic confession of
the Church, but the same question is asked of us today that was asked of my friend, Tony, “Do you believe it? Do you believe in the virgin? And is it even important that we do so?” To that I would answer “yes” because I believe it addresses the essential question as to “who” Jesus was, an understanding each of us must come to for ourselves; but rest assured, we’ll only address the theological aspects of that question.
Theologian Karl Barth writes, “In the creeds the assertion of the Virgin Birth is plainly enough characterized as a first statement about the One who was and is and will be the Son of God. It is not a statement about how He became this…it is a description of the way in which the Son of God became man.” Barth is making the assertion we have made previously in our study of the Apostles’ Creed and of Scripture itself. They don’t often explain “how” something happens, but simply state “that” it happens. They better “proclaim” than they do “explain”, and this statement about the virgin birth is a perfect example. In Luke’s telling the angel surely must have paused, at least momentarily, when Mary asked, “How can this be?” as he sought to find just the right words to use to explain what would soon happen to her, finally settling on, “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 holy.” More “proclamation” I’d say than “explanation”, but it seemed to suffice.
In many ways, this teaching about the virgin birth has fallen out of favor as a theological conviction. Perhaps for some it is too difficult a concept to grasp, or too much of a stretch to believe. Quite candidly, this miracle is no harder for me to believe than many of the others. It is no challenge for me to believe that the God who was able to “speak” the heavens and the earth in to being could also find a way to conceive a child in a virgin by the Holy Spirit. But the real essential nature of this teaching has far less to do with “how” Jesus was born than it does with what it says about “who” Jesus really is. As Barth writes, “the truth is clear that the man Jesus Christ has His origin simply in God, that is, He owes His beginning in history to the fact that God became (human).” This is what sets Jesus apart from all others. His origin is not in the desire of a man and a woman, but in God. So, the real miracle is not that it was a “virgin” birth at all, but that this was the means by which “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” It is the miracle of the incarnation about which we spoke last week. This is the cornerstone conviction of our faith, that in Jesus, God came to us “con carne”, in carnis, in the flesh. The real miracle of the virgin birth is the miracle of God taking on human form, Immanuel, “God with us”.
While many are willing to discard or at least to relegate this doctrine as a lesser teaching, I have always felt it to be essential, or at least primary, because it speaks to the very nature of who Jesus is and who we need Him to be for us and our salvation; that is, both fully human and fully divine. Simply put, if Jesus is not both of these, both fully human and fully divine, born both of human parentage and of the Spirit of God, then His ability to win our redemption or secure our salvation comes in to question.
Here is how I come to that conclusion. The central teaching of our faith is that “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners” ( I Timothy 1:15). He came to be both our Savior and our Lord, and He can be these for us only if He is somehow categorically different than we are. He can do this for us only if He really is God in human flesh and nothing less.
If Jesus were, like you and me, the child born of the relations of a man and a woman, in His case Mary and Joseph, then He would be, in essence, no different than you or me at all. He may have been wiser, better, kinder, gentler, but He would have been essentially no different than any one of us, a mere man, albeit an exceptional one. If He was only human then His death would have been an act of sacrifice and martyrdom “par excellence”, but in no way could it have offered the power of salvation. If Jesus was human only, like any one of us, He would need to be the recipient of redemption and could not be the Giver of it.
If, on the other hand, He was only fully divine, with no human attributes at all which some of the early heresies suggested, then He may have had the power to save, but how could we possibly relate to Him or Him to us? He couldn’t really understand what it means to be human or to struggle as we struggle, even with issues of faith; and His teachings would surely fall on deaf ears because we could always say, “Yeah, that’s easy for you to say. You are God and not really like us at all.”
So, if Jesus is going to be both our Savior and our Lord then it only makes sense that He would have to be both fully human and fully divine, which is the cornerstone confession of our faith and the essential teaching of the theological doctrine of the virgin birth. A mystery? Absolutely. Beyond the means or imagination of God? Not even close. As the angel very plainly reminded Mary, and now us in our hearing, “Nothing is impossible with God”; to which Mary responded, “Here I am, let it be with me according to your Word.” And it was so.
The truth of the virgin birth is not only that it was a virgin birth, God surely could have chosen any number of different ways of sending us His salvation; no, the truth of the virgin birth is that this is the means by which God chose to take on human flesh. In this particular and peculiar way, God became like us so that we could become like Him. This is the means by which “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and we beheld His glory.”
Our faith rests on the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth, the One we call the Christ, is both fully human and fully divine, and in this He, and He alone, is capable of being both our Savior and our Lord as no one else can. If Jesus is not both of these, then He might be a good role model for us, but He cannot be our Redeemer. But since He is both fully human and fully divine our salvation is assured as we put our trust in Him.
Given then that this is the means by which God chose to allow the Word to become flesh, the question is suddenly both straightforward and essential for us to consider and answer for ourselves, “Do you believe in the virgin?”
Tony hesitated for a moment, all eyes of Maria’s family locked firmly upon him, then he thought, “Wait a minute! I don’t really know what she’s asking, but I do know about me and I do know about Maria and I do believe what the Scriptures say about Mary”, so he simply answered, “Yes!” And that was sufficient. Her grandmother smiled and then hugged him as she welcomed him to the family.
May we with him, and with them, and with believers through the centuries, in the gratitude of faith, say, “Yes! I do believe in the Virgin.” Amen.
Prayer.
Let us stand and confess our faith together using the words of the Apostles’ Creed.
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell. The third day He arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen.