4th Sunday Advent A - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2007

They will call him Emmanuel, a name which means “God-is-with-us.”

God is with us.  It was Ahaz, a not-very-faithful Jewish king, eight centuries before Christ, who first heard that name, proclaimed by Isaiah, the spokesperson of God, in relation to Ahaz’s soon-to-be-born son and prince, Hezekiah.  At the time, the Jewish kingdom was under intense pressure – pretty much a small-part player in the power politics of the region.  But, given the superior military power of Syria, to the North, and soon of Assyria, to the North-East, Ahaz wasn’t prepared to put his money on, or his trust in, the God who might be with him, the God of Judah.

When Matthew wrote his Gospel, he took the message given by Isaiah about the Jewish prince Hezekiah, and applied it to Jesus: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, a name which means God-is-with-us.  For Matthew: in Jesus, God is indeed with us.  And in the last line of his Gospel, Matthew has the risen Jesus say to his gathered, and bewildered, disciples: Behold, I am with you always, until the end of time.

Ahaz took it for granted that a God who is with us would necessarily be a God who is against them.  Some people, unfortunately, still make the same conclusion.  After 9/11, the American President prayed : “God bless America”, as America mounted its military crusade against what America termed the Axis of Evil.  “God is with us … God on our side.  God against them … against our enemies.”

Yet a God who does not love the whole of creation and every person who draws life from God is a false God, a non-God, an idol.  Jesus so clearly said, Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations.  The God who is with us in Jesus, in Jesus who is with us until the end of time, is the God of all nations, and of every single person.  God who loves us is the God to whom every person is equally precious.  God has no favourites.

St Paul got that message clearly, as we heard in today’s Second Reading.  Writing to non-Jewish Christians in Rome, he said: Through Christ, we (meaning himself) received grace and our (my) apostolic mission to preach the obedience of faith to all pagan nations.  And he went on to say to them, as he could equally say to us today: You are one of those nations, and by his call you belong to Jesus Christ.  And our possibility is to open ourselves, as Paul put it, to the obedience of faith – to come to share the vision, the love, the energy of God, by learning obedience, that is, by drawing always closer to the mind and heart of God.

In case that might be too high-falutin, today’s Gospel brings us back to earth.  As the Gospels insist, the unknowable God – the essentially Other (with a capital O) – is with us in Jesus.  And in case we get the wrong idea, and construct a Jesus of our own, Matthew shows us today this Jesus as a child, to all intents and purposes, as others might see it, a potentially illegitimate child – vulnerable in the extreme.  Jesus, God-with-us, retained that vulnerability all his life – by his own choice and in line with his mission .  As Icon of God, he necessarily loved – And all who choose to love, seriously and consistently, share his vulnerability – including God.