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We know nothing of Jesus' grandparents. What must they have felt? Did they respond like so many parents of unmarried teenagers today, with an outburst of fury and moral lectures and then perhaps a period of sullen silence until at last the bright-eyed newborn arrives to melt the ice and arrange a fragile family truce?

Nine months of awkward explanations, the lingering scent of scandal - it seems almost as if God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for his entrance, as if to avoid any accusation of favoritism. I am impressed that when the Son of God became a human being, he played by the rules, harsh rules: small towns do not treat kindly young boys who grow up with questionable paternity.

Malcolm Muggeridge observed that in modern times, with family-planning clinics offering ways to correct "mistakes" that might disgrace a family name, "It is, in point of fact, extremely improbable … that Jesus would have been permitted to be born at all. Mary's pregnancy, in poor circumstances, and with the father unknown, would have been an obvious case for an abortion; and her talk of having conceived as a result of the intervention of the Holy Ghost would have pointed to the need for psychiatric treatment, and made the case for terminating her pregnancy even stronger. Thus our generation, needing a Savior more, perhaps, than any that has ever existed, would be too humane to allow one to be born."

The virgin Mary, though, whose family was not planned, had a different response. She heard the angel out, pondered the enormous consequences, and replied, "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said." Every work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response, Mary embraced both. She was the first to accept Jesus on his own terms, regardless of the personal cost.

Copyright 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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December 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 14