Artists throughout the centuries have tried to capture the moment when the angel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will become the mother of God. These depictions attempt to approach the unapproachable, to capture even a fleeting glance of that moment of all moments: the instance in which the infinite God, whose essence exceeds every category of thought and exists beyond being itself, quickened into frail, embryonic finitude in the womb of a human woman.

In some instances she is sitting, and others standing, surrounded by the comfortable trappings of ordinary life. Her counterpart, an angelic visitor, is sometimes bedecked in radiance, and sometimes cloaked in unassuming traveler’s clothes. Sometimes no angel is portrayed at all, only a beam of light. In some representations, our heroine is placid; in others, she shields her eyes against a blinding brightness.

For Christians, the Annunciation strikes a note that reverberates through all the subsequent events in Jesus’ spectacular story. Living in the coda of salvation history, we are able to size it up in its symphonic fullness. We recognize and appreciate the Annunciation, as we do all the individual leitmotifs of that story, but soon they dissolve into the sweeping recapitulation of the theme of redemption and of the hope for the world to come.

For Mary, no such foreshortening of the story was afforded. Yes, there was the glorious instant of the angelic proclamation, and the bell strike of her own words spoken in response: “Be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). But then the reverberating peal of that strike must have slowly faded until the silence of the chalk-grey mundanity of an ordinary day gathered around her once more. The very fabric of the universe had, with Gabriel’s message, been irreversibly altered. And yet there was no visible evidence of the seismic upturning of the cosmos, no apocalyptic visions or thrones and dominions descending in glory. It remained invisible to the whole world, invisible even to her.

Scripture does, however, provide a window into Mary’s mind through the record of her subsequent actions. The angel told Mary of not only one miraculous conception but two: her cousin Elizabeth was also with child and was even now more than six months into her own pregnancy. Elizabeth, as we know from the biblical account, resided some distance from Mary, in “the hill country” (Luke 1:39), possibly up to a hundred miles from Nazareth. It would have been no small act, either of faith or of practical effort, for Mary to have made such a journey. And yet, likely with as short a preparation as possible, Mary set out to visit her cousin.

The account of this meeting between the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, known as the Visitation, is a feast of revelations, so much so that we are easily distracted by its more radiant aspects. There is the joyous leaping of Elizabeth’s unborn child in her womb. Then there are Elizabeth’s timeless words, spoken in adoration over her younger cousin: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!” (Luke 1:42). Perhaps our eyes gloss over the text from there and turn to the Magnificat, Mary’s own canticle of praise: “My soul glorifies the Lord…” (Luke 1:46–55). It would be easy enough to summarize this episode primarily as a vibrant exposition of God’s faithfulness, a theme that runs through the whole of the first two chapters of Luke.

And yet to conclude the story there would be to miss the strange hints slipped into the margins of the narrative that point at another dimension. A closer look reveals that, the child leaps within Elizabeth, not at the arrival of the Christ Child in Mary’s womb, but at Mary’s greeting. Elizabeth herself affirms this: “As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy” (Luke 1:44). Elizabeth then summarizes for us the meaning of this strange and transformative interchange: “Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!” (Luke 1:45). It is this declaration that gives rise to Mary’s song of exaltation.

You see, this story is not only about God’s faithfulness; it is equally about Mary’s. It is no accident that the Gospel of Luke begins not with Mary, but with Elizabeth, for these two stories are inextricably entwined. Scripture tells us that before Mary arrived, Elizabeth had been sequestered for months. We don’t know why she chose to remove herself from her community, but it is not hard to imagine that feelings of uncertainty and anxiety might have assailed her. In seeing this possible intonation in the story, we apprehend even more profoundly the gift of Mary’s visit.

In the face of such a staggering, life-changing event as the Annunciation, it would have been natural for Mary to turn inward, to retreat into a space of reflection and prayer. Instead Mary acted out her yes to God by turning her attention outward toward others. The Annunciation can only be properly understood in the light of the Visitation, because it is in the latter episode that we see in Mary the fruits of faithful waiting, what it means to “let it be with me according to your word.”

We too live between an annunciation and an arrival. Christ has come, and we, on the far side of his death and resurrection, are the recipients of his good news. Christ’s redeeming presence now exists in the world; we bear it in ourselves. And yet the promise that his presence anticipates remains hidden within us. We tarry in the long uncertainty of history’s development, waiting for when Christ will return in glory and draw all creation to himself so that, as 1 Corinthians 15:28 tells us, “God may be all in all.” We know that God has promised this to us, but the time appointed remains behind the veil, even as the suffering of the world meets us at every corner.

As we journey through Advent, we are invited to ask ourselves what it might mean to wait faithfully for the joy of Christmas. In the Visitation, we are offered a vivid model in Mary, who reveals to us not only the favored one who says to God, “I am the Lord’s servant,” but who shows it to be true by living it out in her actions. Mary, the one in whose womb the very God of the universe became human, proved herself the most blessed among women not by retreating from the world in a state of sanctified otherness but by jaunting out into it without reserve, driven only by love.

In some paintings of the Visitation, Mary stands over an elderly Elizabeth, who kneels before her, even as Mary comforts her cousin. In others, the two women hold each other in a fervent embrace, their mutual adoration emanating luminously from the canvas. And in still others, the two stand beside each other, hands upon their pregnant bellies, within which are revealed the child promised to each. In these different dimensions of the Visitation story, the same theme rises repeatedly to the surface: the sign of Christ’s presence in us is not found by turning inward, but rather by setting outward toward others so that we might find him reflected to us in the aspect of their eyes. 

In Advent, we stand between the annunciation of salvation and the nativity of eternity. In Mary’s example, we are given a way to journey through that season of waiting, but only if we venture forth. The hope that has been conceived within us can only come to fruition through our acts of giving ourselves away. Our annunciations can only truly be good news for the world through our visitations.