Fr Paul Gooley reads from the Gospel of Luke (1: 26-38) in which Mary, visited by an angel, accepts God’s will for her and agrees to be the mother of Jesus.

Fr Paul asks ‘What was the young girl Mary doing when the message came? Kneeling piously? Feeding the sheep? Fetching water? Sweeping the mud floor? What was she thinking?’

She was engaged to be married so, surely, she was thinking about her approaching wedding to Joseph and about the children she would bear.

Then came the message which she could accept or refuse, the message on which hung the future of the world: her child would be different from all others. How ‘different’? Her thoughts were turned back to the promise to David. It had been read to her so often in the Bible, and now the words were drummed into her mind, ‘his reign will have no end’.

This would all be the work of the Spirit which she had so often heard read out in Isaiah; ‘the Holy Spirit will come upon you’, the Spirit which was to come upon the Servant of the Lord, the Spirit of Emmanuel, ‘God with us’.

Her young body was to grow, nourish and develop this child. Then she would have the child in her arms to cherish and shape as both Son of God and her own son.