4th Sunday Advent A - Homily 3

Homily 3 – 2010

She has conceived the child within her by the Holy Spirit: The child she is shaping and nurturing in her womb originates from God.  God has become human.  We say it so easily – as though we understand what it means.  But, then, what else can we do? What else can we say? At least, let us pause, take our shoes off, as it were, and allow ourselves to approach mystery – sacred mystery.

You must name him … That is what fathers did.  Their naming a child legally recognised it as belonging to a family, a community, a people – to this family, this community, this people.  Whilst mysteriously originating from God, this child is one of us – in all his singularity, three dimensional – one with us in all things (except sin, of course): weak, ignorant, Jewish, vulnerable, free.  One of a people with a long history, one with a great mass of sinners, and a great mass of holy and faithful ones.  Why might that have been so important to Matthew?

You must name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.  Just as the name John means: God is gracious, the name Jesus means: God saves.

The word sin carries the sense of missing the mark, off–line, lost, living aimlessly.  It expresses so well the experience – the reality – of so much of humanity: ignorant, or heedless, of where we have come from, where we are heading, or how we get there – and, because of that, unaware, or heedless, of our own dignity, unaware of the dignity of others, unaware that we become human only by relating in respect, with justice and in love.

What will his saving from sin involve? Matthew would answer that in the rest of his Gospel.  Jesus will save us by enlightening us, teaching us, telling us about God and about God’s love; telling us about ourselves and about life in community – and how to grow in love.  He will show us what he means by his own lifestyle – above all by the way he died – and he will energise us, and empower us, and help us to break free.  More than that.  After his own resurrection to a renewed humanity, he will transform usand bring us into the mystery of the divine from which he came.  The same Holy Spirit, through whose power God took on human nature in Jesus, will so transform us that we shall share, somehow, through our intimate union with Jesus, in the mystery of God – becoming partakers in the divine nature, no less.  He will save us from our sins.  What does this show us of the heart of God?

Matthew concluded the passage by highlighting the consistent determination of God.  He cast his gaze back over seven centuries to the time of the prophet Isaiah.  He quoted the beautiful insight of Isaiah that God would always be faithful to the promise: God is with us – Emmanuel.  God had ensured the continuation of Israel at a time when the great political and military might of Assyria threatened its very existence: the king’s young wife was already pregnant: the virgin is with child and will give birth to a son. the royal line would continue.  The nation would not disappear.

The same, consistent God whose will had been always, and only, to save, had now revealed himself definitively in human history.  Another virgin is with child, and will give birth to another son.  With the advent of Jesus,the one who saves the world, God has come, once and for all, to be with us.  Is that your sense of God?