Entertaining God's New Ideas

Thank goodness Mary of Nazareth didn’t have misocainea, or Jesus wouldn’t have been born!

“Misocainea” means “a hatred of new ideas” (from Greek “miso” [hate] + “cainea” [new]). And boy, did God have a new idea for Mary: she, a virgin, would give birth to God’s son, the long-awaited Messiah! Most young women would have disdain for such a proposition, and naturally so; pregnancy before marriage would bring shame on her and her family and disrupt her own plans to be wed and have a conventional family. Yet Mary was willing to entertain God’s idea and agreed to be God’s partner in bringing it to fruition. In doing so, she changed the course of human history.

Scripture offers the story of another person, Zachariah, who did have misocainea. When the angel Gabriel announced to Zachariah that his barren wife Elizabeth would bear a son, Zachariah doubted that this new idea was possible and asked for proof before he would believe what Gabriel had to say. As a result of his unwillingness to entertain this new idea, he became deaf and dumb until his child was born.

John Foley notes of Zachariah, “This kind of doubt should never have occurred to him. God's voice had already spoken love into his heart throughout his whole life…. His trust in God’s promise should have been the deepest meaning of his existence. In this sense, Zechariah was already deaf and mute when the Angel spoke to him! He could not receive the words (so was deaf), and therefore would not be able to tell his wife, Elizabeth (so was mute).”

People who hate new ideas (likely because they didn’t come up with these ideas themselves) are deaf to the possibilities God offers us. They reject the God who says with love, “I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29: 11).

If we listen and incline the ear of our heart, as St. Benedict instructs, we will be familiar with God’s voice and trust the new ideas that God proposes. As in so many things, Mary is a model for us in this regard, and hearing her Annunciation story in Advent primes us to be alert for the annunciations of new ideas in our own lives.