Just like the story of Pat Boone gives us hope that we, too, can follow Jesus in a messed-up world, another article in the Wall Street Journal reminds us that following Jesus is not such a bad idea after all. When Mary Met the Angel by Rebecca McLaughlin is too good not to share: it has it all, from the virgin birth to the resurrection. It’s long, but I commend it to you in its entirety. Here are some highlights (also long!):

The first person ever to hear that Jesus is the Son of God was a low-income teenage girl in an obscure backwater of the Roman empire. She went by the most common name for Jewish women of her time and place: She was just another Mary. But then she claimed an angel had appeared to her and told her she would give birth to the Son of God. From the perspective of both Jews and Romans in the first century A.D., her story was completely unbelievable. How has it lasted for 2,000 years?

…Mary’s story feels like a fairy tale. But angels in the Bible aren’t remotely fairylike. They’re terrifying messengers from God. Of course, if there’s no God, then angels are ruled out. But if there is a God who made the universe, it’s not irrational to think he could have made angelic creatures too.

…To first-century Jewish ears, the claim that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit of God would have been offensive and absurd. The Greek and Roman gods had been depicted spawning demigods with human mothers, but Israel’s God was nothing like these pagan deities. He was the maker of the heavens and the earth—the one whom humans could not see and live. What the angel told Mary was the kind of thing that could get you stoned for blasphemy. When Jesus as an adult claimed divine identity, he nearly suffered stoning several times.

For Romans, Mary’s claim that Jesus was both human and divine would not have sounded blasphemous per se. Not only did their gods sometimes spawn humans, but emperors could be proclaimed as gods. Divinity was like a Roman Nobel Prize for greatness. But Jesus never led an army or controlled an empire. Worse, he died the most humiliating death a Roman could imagine. The notion that he was God made flesh would have been laughable.

But after Jesus’ death, another Mary made another claim. Mary Magdalene was one of many women among Jesus’ disciples, and on the third day after witnessing his crucifixion, she went to Jesus’ tomb to tend to his body. Like Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene claimed that she had talked with angels. Then she reported that she had met with Jesus too. The first Mary said that Jesus had been supernaturally born from her womb; the second, that he had been miraculously reborn from his tomb.

The first Mary’s claim that Jesus was the everlasting ruler of the world sounds much less crazy now, when billions across the world acknowledge Jesus as their King. When Mary Magdalene first made her claim, the followers of Jesus were a tiny Jewish sect. Today they represent the largest global religion: 31% of humans say they are Christians…Far from being a white Western religion, Christianity was multiethnic from the first, and today Christians are by far the world’s most racially and culturally diverse religious group.

None of this makes Christian belief any easier for those who think that science has ruled out the possibility of such things as virgin births and resurrections. But as Princeton historian Hans Halvorson has written, the scientific revolution was started by early-modern Christians not because they wanted an alternative hypothesis to God but because they believed in a God who is both rational and free. Today, many Christian scientists who believe that Jesus was miraculously born and resurrected see these extraordinary miracles as moments when the God who wrote the laws of nature and sustains them day by day did something different.

…What about ethics? Once pregnant, Mary prophesied that God would start a moral revolution through her son—that he would raise the poor and lowly and upend the power structures of the world (Luke 1:46-55). Her statements would have seemed bizarre in the Roman Empire, where might was right. But as the historian Tom Holland has argued in his book “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World,” Jesus’ upside-down ethics has so impressed itself upon our minds that today we think universal human rights, caring for the poor, justice for the oppressed, and equality for men and women are just basic moral common sense. Mr. Holland sets us straight: “That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it…The origins of this principle [lie] not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”

…Christianity’s claim that God not only became human but modeled and commanded care for the most vulnerable, before he himself died a brutal and humiliating death, has placed the poor, sick and oppressed forever at the heart of Christian ethical concern.

…Christians believe that the Son of God was born to die, so that all who trust in him could live as sons and daughters of God—wrapped up more tightly in his love than the newborn Jesus was wrapped up by Mary in his swaddling clothes.

When Mary met the angel, she was a no-name girl from a disempowered people in a seemingly inconsequential place. Today, if you worry that you might be insignificant—unknown, unloved and unimportant in this world—perhaps this Christmas you will hear her message with fresh ears. If she was right about her son, then you are worth the birth and life and death and resurrection of the Son of God. – Rebecca McLaughlin, When Mary Met the Angel

Good stuff, written, perhaps, so that those who consider themselves intellectuals can see that the Gospel is not so far-fetched after all and that many of our values about equality and dignity for all are actually Christian. I sent the article to a friend of mine who would probably describe himself as agnostic. He thanked me and said it was “well written.” I’m praying it will be “well-read.”

Let’s go into the New Year with our heads held high, humbly believing and sharing the best news ever passed on.

But the truth is that Christ has been raised up… (1 Corinthians 15.20, MSG)

For nothing will be impossible with God. (Luke 1.37, ESV)