Luke 1:30-31 NIV [30] But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. [31] You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. This is the day we celebrate the annunciation of the angel to Mary and the incarnation of the divine in the human. Now, we know that Jesus probably wasn't born on December 25, so this is probably not the day that the angel appeared to Mary. But that's not important. The important thing to remember is that God decided that this was the time for him to enter into humanity and bring the gift of salvation that had been promised since the sin of our first parents. As it says in John's Gospel, "The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth." Redemption had come. Jesus was the Messiah, not the type of Messiah that the people were expecting; he wasn't a powerful king, born into a rich and powerful family. No, he was thought to be the son of a carpenter from Nazareth, a small and insignificant town. This was a stumbling block for the Jewish leadership of the time. In Matthew's Gospel, Acts and in the first letter of Peter, he is called "the stone that the builders rejected that has become the cornerstone." They were comparing Jesus as the cornerstone of Christianity as Psalm 118 spoke of the cornerstone of the temple. Do you ever wonder if you would have recognized Jesus as the Messiah? Would you have followed him as he preached in Galilee or in Judea? Would you have been willing to die for him? I ask because I'm not sure that I would say "yes" to any of these questions. Mary said "yes" to an unknown future and because she did, we are saved. All we have to do is say "yes" to the gift.