Here, with Elizabeth, Mary regains her composure, begins to make sense of the Annunciation, and reclaims her agency in it. During the Annunciation, the angel of the Lord had enacted history upon a young, naive girl, announcing that she had been chosen to have the Son of God thrust into her womb. It is here, in community, that Mary begins to assert herself upon history, to make history her own story. In community, she sings the stunning, prophetic words of the Magnificat. In community, the young maiden becomes the Theotokos, the God-bearer, that we know and love so well.
Like so many before her, Mary had experienced the revelation of God in isolation, and it was disorienting and troubling. It is that disorienting revelation which sends Mary, like others before her, in search of community to make sense of her situation. Moses descends from the lonely revelation on Mt. Sinai with the mandate to form a community of peace and justice. Elijah comes down from the quiet, still revelation of God on Mt. Horeb, despite the perils of assassins, and moves toward the people whom God has reserved. It's not just the world-changing substance of these revelations that is important, but the fundamental motion of these revelations that we should notice. Revelations, by the very nature of their terror and confusion, send us right where God wants us—to community.
In community, the troubling revelation becomes good news for Mary. The Annunciation becomes more than a magical birth announcement. It becomes an eternal song of praise, the Magnificat, that signals a new world order in the birth of Christ in which the world would be turned upside-down, in which the hungry would be filled and the exploitative rich would be cast down, in which a young maiden can become a prophet, a poet, and the co-creator of God.
In community, we can wait. Indeed, it is only in community that we can wait at all. Waiting cannot happen in isolation, for the silence of God would crush hope. But in community, the revelation of a Reign of God that is here and still eons away becomes a hope, a shared vision to incarnate.
In community, we find the courage to wait while the world is changing, while we change the world. Perhaps the most compelling piece of the Annunciation and the Magnificat is the throwaway line at the close of the Mary's song of praise. After Mary foretells the wholesale remaking of the world through a baby she would carry, the gospel of Luke closes the Magnificat with this anticlimactic, prosaic benediction: "And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned home."
Tucked amid the breaking-in of God into history are nine months of pregnancy's wait, three months of waiting with a friend, meals to cook, dishes to clean, stories to share, neighbors to love. Where the Annunciation initially sent Mary into a flustered hurried to escape, the Magnificat roots her in place, in community and compels her to stay, to wait for the world to change, beginning with her own small, teenaged belly.
Perhaps this is the lesson we are to take away from the end of Advent: that it is only in community that we can realize the hope of the season. Only in community can the announcement that the Lord is with us be a blessing and not a curse. Only in community can we embrace the paradox that the wait is finally over, but that it is also just beginning. Only in community can we muster the courage to hope that while what happens next in the story of God might be anybody's guess, something is indeed happening. And that it is disturbingly good.
So perhaps, this Advent, God is not late after all.
Perhaps she is just pregnant.
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