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This article originally appeared in the December 12, 1986 issue of Christianity Today.

At Christmas, most Protestants are tolerant enough to allow Mary limited access onto our greeting cards and into our crèches and carols. But the rest of the year she is a victim of simple neglect. In bending over backwards to avoid certain excesses of veneration, we have abandoned Mary to a kind of evangelical limbo.

Yet it could be different if we avoid both extremes, and look at Mary clearly enough to see the woman shown us in the Bible. Not only was she a simple mortal, unpretentious enough for us all to identify with, but she nudges our self-centered "me generation" toward the path of the God-centered, the faithful, the obedient. If we read Mary into each one of the Beatitudes, we will not falsify her character.

From Mary we may also learn about the courage to say yes, especially as we are faced with challenges from God that may seem to us nearly as impossible or outrageous as the angel's demand.

It seemed too much to ask

of one small virgin

that she should stake shame

against the will of God …

and it seems much

too much to ask you, or me,

to be part of the

different thing –

God's shocking, unorthodox,

unheard of Thing,

to further heaven's hopes

and summon God's glory.

Mary said yes to God. Perhaps God chose her body and her spirit as the venue for Christ's arrival on our planet because he knew it was her habit of life to say yes to her father and her Father.

… We have seen the studies, sepia strokes across yellowed parchment, the fine detail of hand and breast and the fall of cloth—Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Titian,El Greco,

Rouault—each complex Madonna positioned,

sketched, enlarged, each likeness plotted at last

on canvas, layered with pigment, like the final

draft of a poem after thirty-nine roughs.

But Mary, virgin, had no sittings, no chance

to pose her piety, no novitiate for body or for heart. The moment was on her unaware:

the Angel in the room, the impossible demand,

the response without reflection. Only one word of curiosity, echoing Zechariah's "How?"

yet innocently voiced, without request for proof.

The teen head tilted in light, the hand trembling a little at the throat, the candid eyes, wide with acquiescence to shame and glory –

"Be it unto me as you have said."

After Mary said her unmistakable yes, after her insemination by the Spirit of God, "the angel left her" isolated, in silence. His bright presence had imprinted itself in her eyes, his words still sang in her ears, the seed of God burned in her body. No wonder she needed to talk to another woman! And how serendipitous it must have seemed that God had also worked a miracle of conception in Elizabeth.

Two Greek words for blessed give us significant clues to the kind of person Mary was. In Luke 1:42, Elizabeth's greeting word is eulogetos—"Blessed are you among women"—a term that told her, as had Gabriel, that she was specially favored, or well-spoken of, by the Lord.

This Jewish blessing could not be revoked or reversed; the sound and the meaning of it would live and throb in Mary's mind as a perpetual sign of God's affirmation and approval, in spite of all the trials that would track her life. Being "blessed" meant that God favored and trusted her enough to burden her with one of life's most difficult roles: being the mother of a paradox—one who was God enfleshed in a man's body, yet was considered a failure, and ultimately, a criminal.

The other word for blessed used by Elizabeth was makarios—which means "satisfied, fulfilled; full of God." The context in which Elizabeth spoke this prophetic word was significant. Mary was to be full of God (both physically and spiritually) because she "believed that what the Lord had said to her would be accomplished." The Spirit-impelled dialogue between these two women occurs in a kind of euphoria of holy wonder. "My spirit rejoices in God my Savior!" Marvel! Sing aloud to the Lord! (Is she thinking and speaking, this pregnant adolescent, in italics and exclamation marks?)

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