- Who is she, called blessed?
- Why is she blessed?
- Where in the Bible do we come across this?
At the outset we need to understand that Luke’s records found in chapters 1 and 2 are unique to his gospel. He was a devout convert of the first century and a close associate of St. Paul. In three of his epistles Paul is making a mention of Luke. He was a medical doctor by profession and Greek by nationality. Luke’s accounts are historical and very orderly. As he himself points out he has ‘carefully investigated everything from the beginning’. The preamble he gives in the book of Acts, indicates that Luke must be well known to the governor Theophilus. Scholars believe that he would not have known Jesus personally and the account of the angelic visitation of Mary in Nazareth of Galilee would have been arrived at, by Luke’s personal interview with Mary the mother of Jesus of Nazareth and other eye witnesses.
As I was studying the narrative of the angelic visitation of Virgin Mary, I could find a good comparison and contrast between this and the satanic visitation of Eve in the Garden of Eden. The first one reported in the Old Testament is the satanic visit of Eve and the first one reported in the New Testament is the angelic visit of Mary. Both women had been all by themselves at the time of visitation. One resulted in a ‘fall’ and the other in ‘redemption from the fall’. How? Eve never ‘personalised’ the word of God while Virgin Mary though single, ‘personalised’ the Word when it came to her. This act of submission to God’s Word made her a channel of blessing to the whole world. Yes, from then on ‘all generations all over the world have called her blessed Mary’. There are a lot of lessons to be learnt from Virgin Mary .
