1:26-28 — In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you."

Six months after Zechariah's encounter with the Gabriel, God sends the angel to Nazareth there to meet with Mary. Mary is first described simply as "a virgin pledged to be married to . . . Joseph, a descendent of David." The NT tells us very little about her as a person or of her background; so little in fact do we know anything about Mary that when the Catholic Church felt that a godly woman must have a saintly mother to whom it may appeal for help and supplication, it concocted a name, St Anne, almost out of thin air to identify her. According to the Gospels she was simply a simple woman whose obedience to the Lord brought us the great blessing of our Saviour ("I am the Lord's servant . . . May it be to me as you have said," v38). For that alone she warrants our high esteem. Her obedience and the trauma she had to suffer as her son was crucified set a model for what it means to be obedient. But to venerate her is to do her dishonour. The Gospels and the early Church refused to do that; neither should we.

The angel 's greeting is simple, but is full of evangelical depth. Though NIV's 'highly' is not represented by a separate word in the Greek text, it accords well with the sense of the participle, kecharistomene, "bestowed freely with grace." To be freely bestowed with grace may make Mary rich in grace, but this is a very different flavour from the Roman Catholic Douay-Rheims's translation "full of grace," implying—in line with the rest of Roman Catholic mariology—that Mary was herself the giver of grace. Scriptures nowhere implies or suggests such a teaching.

To this the angel adds, "The Lord is with you." While the Greek word kurios may, like the English word 'lord,' simply mean a master or someone of high honour, its use in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew word 'adonay, Yhwh, the personal name of God, means that it would almost immediately be understood by Mary as a reference to Yahweh. Nor would it have been strange to her, perceptive as she shows herself to be in the rest of the text following. "The Lord is with you" is simply a rephrasing of the Hebrew expression Immanuel, "God is with us" (Isa 7:14). It is, of course, difficult to decide the extent Mary herself understood the significance of the expression of faith reflected in the phrase in her own life. The expression, however, is the richest and fullest summary of the good news of the entire Bible compacted into a single word. There is nothing weightier or consequential a blessing than can be asked for.

Some ancient manuscripts have in their text at this point also the sentence, "Blessed are you among women." This is reflected in the KJV and NKJ. Most modern text critics do not think that it was part of the original text and it is usually omitted from modern English translations.