4th Sunday Advent A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2013

Matthew drew on a comment that Isaiah made seven hundred years beforehand to shed light on the meaning of the  mystery of Jesus, “He will be called Immanuel”.  He then helpfully translated the Hebrew word for us.  It means, “God is with us”.  Whatever about Isaiah’s intention, what point was Matthew making?  “God is with us”.  With whom? the Jewish nation to which Jesus belonged? the groups of Christian disciples for whom Matthew was writing? or all the various nations that would people the earth over the centuries?  Matthew did not elaborate.

How do we hear it as we gather here listening today?  “God is with us” – with us Catholics? with us Christians? Do Muslims belong to that “us” that God is with? And, to concretise things even more, do Asylum Seekers?  And if they do, how might that affect the ways we relate to them?  Just how much inclusivity am I comfortable with? 

However we answer that, I presume that we all see ourselves at least included.  How do you feel about God being “with you”?  How do you feel about the real God taking a real interest in the real you? Delighted? Scared stiff? Laid back, largely uninterested?   How we feel will depend on our sense of God – unpredictable, or just, judge? benevolent parent? passionate lover? Or an uneasy mixture of some or all or none of the above?  “God is with us”.

Whatever about “Immanuel”, Joseph in fact named the child “Jesus”.  And once more Matthew helpfully offered the reason for the name by adding “because he will save his people from their sins”.  The name, in fact, simply meant “God saves”.  Matthew added the extra.  But that gives us enough to go further.  The God who is “with us” is the God who “saves us from our sins".  So our sins are not the problem with God.  God can cope with them – not by somehow making us all “good boys” or “good girls”, but by saving us, by forgiving us.  God’s problem is not our sinfulness – but our readiness to engage and to relate with God.  That is what faith, believing, means: trusting God, entrusting myself to God, believing God’s forgiveness.

John the Baptist’s idea of repentance, or conversion, seems to have been something like, “Behave yourselves, and get your act together”.  Jesus’ idea of repentance, or conversion, was different, “Believe the Good News – God and God’s Kingdom are near at hand.”  Usually, our first step on the way of conversion is to move from being bad to being good, from being wrong to being right.  OK – except that we never quite succeed. The way of conversion needs to go further; and, surprisingly perhaps, it is not moving from being good to being better.  We usually experience it as the disconcerting realisation that “All along I’ve got it wrong”.  And the only thing that allows me to get even close to recognising that is the overwhelming insight that God loves me anyhow, just as I am.  That, in turn, gives me the wonderful freedom to see even more of myself, and to wonder what more will I discover that I have still got "all wrong all along”.

Whatever I discover will not frighten me – because it is God’s loving forgiveness that frees me up to see it.  But it will change my sense of myself, and bring me back to reality.  Unexpectedly, I might even find that I start to become more like God – more able to accept and to love myself, and more able to accept and love others – not fazed by my sinfulness nor fazed by anyone else’s sinfulness, whatever practical shapes they take.  As I learn to love, the world changes, too – a little.

Somehow, God’s turning up among us, firstly as an embarrassing, and even dangerous, pregnancy, and then as a vulnerable infant [who survived being murdered just by a whisker], encourages us to explore further how much we really believe that the God who is really with us is a God really determined to do everything possible to really save us.

And that is one of the things for which we say “Thank you” at this Eucharist.