Tomorrow is Christmas Day, the long-awaited gift-unwrapping, festive-feasting, joy-filled-day we’ve all been waiting for. We have one more day to feast on the Incarnation with all of its joyous implications for our lives. Usually, the day after Christmas Day, I find myself tucking the accounts of Mary, Joseph, Zechariah, Elizabeth, the shepherds, angels, and wise men back into boxes, much like my Christmas decorations, waiting for them to be pulled out again next year.

But this year is different. I’ve meditated so much and so long on the Christmas story in the Gospel accounts, particularly in Luke, that I can’t box back up what I’ve unwrapped. The gifts of the season are spread out all over the floor of my heart like so many ribbons, bows, and pieces of wrapping paper. They aren’t to be stored away until next year; rather, the implications of the Incarnation and events surrounding Christ’s birth are to be worn, used, inserted into my life, and lived out all year long.

Some of the lessons I’ve learned I’ve shared in my Advent book, Prepare the Way. Others I’ve shared in blogs I’ve written and posted throughout the last few weeks. But one implication I can’t seem to stop thinking about is the Gospels’ portrayal and honoring of women throughout the Christmas story. My surprise and even awe has come as I’ve pulled out texts from the ancient world that my bookshelves have harbored since high school. As I’ve reread lines from books like Homer’s The Illiad and Virgil’s The Aeneid, I’ve been struck by how their dismissive and harsh treatment of women stands in stark contrast to the dignity and honor Luke gives to Mary and Elizabeth, two women whose names would not have been considered worth the mention in the ancient world.

It helps to remember that Jesus descended into our world during a time when Rome ruled the world. In fact, Luke 2 begins with the reminder: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered” (Luke 2:1). Rome dictated who did what and when. It dictated what gods were worshipped, what criminals were crucified, what people were counted as citizens, and who should be taxed. If you need to wipe your nose, Rome told you where to put your proverbial Kleenex. But Rome also dictated the status of women. For the most part, women were considered to be property, useful for their outward beauty and sexual appeal, their testimonies useless in a court of law. Tom Holland writes in his book Dominion that “any man in a position of power had the right to…use the orifices of a slave or a prostitute to relieve his needs much as he might use a urinal.”¹ It was into this context that Gabriel appeared to Mary, and her name as a female commoner was not just mentioned but honored and given a primary place in the most important story that has ever been written.

This is nothing less than mystifying and astounding. No piece of literature up to this point written by a Gentile writer had ever honored or esteemed women like this. The Aeneid, written only twenty to thirty years prior to the coming of Christ, portrays women “as dangers that men overcome and devices that emphasize men’s strength.”² So where did Luke learn to write like this, think like this, and be willing to be changed like this in his ideas about the worth of women in a world where nothing like this had ever been done?

There is only one answer, not only for Luke but for each one of us. When something changes so radically in a person’s life, when they look so different from the world around them and the work they produce is so counter to the culture surrounding them, this is a change that can only be accounted for by supernatural grace on the move carving out depths in a person’s soul.

Mary was not the only person to be “overshadowed” by the Holy Spirit; Luke was as well. When Pentecost came and the Holy Spirit descended like a flame of fire into the waiting hearts of the disciples (Acts 2:1-4), all believers in history were then given that same gift through relationship with Christ, Luke included.

Mary was not the last to be indwelt by the Spirit of God; she was the first in a long line of common, ordinary people who were transformed into temples of the living God because of the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of the King who came and who is coming again (2 Corinthians 6:16-18).

Luke’s account is not only astounding because of his willingness to honor women but because he writes of a God who does not use women as sexual slaves or to help satisfy men’s perverse sexual pleasures. Throughout his narrative, he consistently shows women are not property to be used, bought, or sold. They are co-heirs in the Kingdom of God, opposite and equal partners in the sharing of the gospel of grace to a world in need (Luke 8:1-3; Galatians 3:28-29).

Luke helped to lay a foundation of life-changing honor, value, and worth for women that our world still stands on today. But every time I read the headlines, I see our culture straying from the life-altering values and implications of the incarnation. And the more our cultures strays, the more we live like Romans instead of Christians, honoring the strong, the wealthy, the powerful, and the glamorous over the humble, the ordinary, the poor, and the weak, the more we crucify what really matters.

This is why headlines like the sex-trafficking charges of the Alexander brothers and the violent shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, are becoming more and more common. A Roman world is a world where violence is the norm; it is one where might makes right, a woman’s worth is tallied in her sexual appeal, and the outward appearance matters more than the inner virtues of the soul.

This is not a world I want to live in, and I don’t want my daughters or nieces or neighbors or friends living in a world like this either. I want a world where the Mary’s and Elizabeth’s are honored and a Herod’s rage is curbed. I want a world where common shepherds and the poor are valued, and the image of God is venerated in men and women alike.

But I also know that a world like this will not be shaped, made, or maintained by writing checks, funding political campaigns, or posting on social media. It might not be less than those things, but it certainly will be more. It will be brought about by those who are willing to let God’s Word have its way in them. It will be brought about through radical repentance (Luke 3:3), humble obedience, and quiet submission to God’s will instead of our own (Luke 1:38). It will require

turning our cheek and forgiving our fiercest enemies. It will require using our time and talents not just to advance our own agenda or names but to love and honor the image of God in people for their own sake, particularly the weak, defenseless, and poor.

Like with Luke’s writing, none of this will happen naturally. It will require a divine work of the Holy Spirit in each one of us, for lasting changes are made and the Kingdom of God comes “`not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts’” (Zechariah 4:6).

As pastor Tim Keller often said, “The Gospel changes everything.” And it’s true. If we have been honest in our readings of the Christmas texts over the past few weeks, we will not be able to leave the Advent season without pondering and asking what needs to change in us. Those new sweatpants you’re going to open tomorrow will be out of style in a few years. The Airpods in a small box underneath your tree will be outdated in a decade. But the gifts the Gospel gives us? Those we have unwrapped over the last four weeks of Advent? Those will last a lifetime and beyond.

They will not wear out, break, or be lost. They will not be outdated or irrelevant in a year, or a decade, or even a century. They will be as counter-cultural, life-giving, radical, and life-changing a thousand years from now as they are today.

These are the gifts to hold onto. These are the treasures, like Mary, “to ponder” and to keep in the forefront of our hearts and minds all year long (Luke 2:52).

What about Advent do you need to take with you into the rest of the calendar year? What part of the great humility of the incarnation, the great reversal of Mary’s Song, the radical hope and healing of shame in Elizabeth’s pregnancy, the restoration of Zechariah’s heart through silence, and the wisdom of the wise men’s worship do you need to take with you into the new year?

Don’t shelve Advent or pack it away into boxes. Leave it unwrapped on the floor of your heart and then put it in a place where you will use it often. When next December rolls around, you will be ready to prepare the way for the King with even more wisdom, grace, strength, and understanding than the year before.

For it’s true – the Gospel changes everything. The Incarnation changes everything. So, what needs to change in you?

1. Tom Holland, Dominion, p. 14 as quoted in Biblical Critical Theory by Christopher Watkin, p. 388. ↩︎
2. Vergil’s Role Of Women In The Aenid. ↩︎