4th Sunday Advent A - Homily 6

 Homily 6 - 2019

We have heard the story before. But how well have we listened? From the time we were children, what we have heard, and sung about in the Christmas Carols, is a mixture of two quite different stories, one written by St Luke, and the other by St. Matthew – though both authors seem to have been unknown to each other. Each of them wrote for a different audience, Luke shaping a story to make sense to a community predominantly of pagan converts, and Matthew writing in a way designed to connect with a community mainly of former Jews. Both of them wrote their Gospels about the same time, roughly fifty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. So some at least in their different audiences were already third-generation Christians.

Both accounts agreed that the parents of Jesus were named Mary and Joseph, that Mary was pregnant, not from Joseph, but from the Holy Spirit of God, and that the child was to be named Jesus. They shared virtually no other detail.

For each author, the infancy narrative served as overture to the Gospel proper that would deal with the teachings and deeds of the adult Jesus, culminating in his death and resurrection. To do justice to each narrative, it helps to take particular notice of the details of each story and to ask ourselves why the author chose to include them. What was he trying to alert us to in the chapters that would follow where he would deal with the public ministry of Jesus and particularly his crucifixion?

More important still, as we listen to the story, is to be watchful for the mystery present between the lines. Whatever about the details of the story, the overwhelming reality is that the child referred to in the story really is “God with us”. God has become human, “like us in all things but sin”, in all things except that he always freely chose the way of love. Not only did God become human, but became a child totally dependent for his existence on the care and love he encountered in his parents. Their love even influenced his developing personality. If any child looks like his mother, this child surely did, given the exclusive DNA. As he grew, he would have picked up his parents’ ways of doing things, their funny sayings, their accent. [The comment is later made that he and his disciples were known as Galileans by their distinctive Galilean accents].

This helpless child reveals to us the heart of God as much as does the dying Jesus stretched out helplessly on the cross. How come we almost invariably think of God as almighty, all-powerful, when his own default option is powerlessness? It seems too easy to fashion God in our image, the God we want, than to allow ourselves to be shaped according to his truth.

And yet, when we stop and think, both the infant Jesus and the tortured, dying Jesus do exert a remarkable but real power of a different kind – the power of love. The only power that can give life is, somehow or other, the power of love. Check it out! That is the power of God [who in fact is nothing but love] – the power that can create, and has created the entire, ever-expanding universe, and everything and everyone in it. The power behind everything that is and moves in our universe is the power of love – never forced on us but there for the finding. That is the power condensed into the heart of both the newborn Christ and the crucified Christ.

So often, on the few occasions I watch the television, I almost despair at the endless flow of banality reminding viewers that it is the season to be extravagant – with not a word about why or what we are in fact celebrating. To touch the mystery, we need deliberately to take time out, to stop, and quietly and joyfully to ponder.