4th Sunday Advent A - Homily 7

Homily 7 - 2022

From the three readings that we heard today, what struck me most were the opening lines of the Second Reading — that were also, as we may have noticed, the opening lines of the Letter that Paul wrote to the faithful community in Rome: “From Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus who has been called to be an apostle, and specially chosen to preach the Good News …”.

To me they reveal a man at home in his own skin, a man in love with Christ, the Christ who had shown Paul how he loved, respected and trusted him enough to call him to spread the message of the world’s definitive salvation. Paul’s energetic confidence revealed a man whose life had finally found meaning. For him, Jesus was clearly Good News.

In all his letters, Paul wrote nothing about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth and little of Jesus’ public life and teaching. What mattered for Paul was Jesus’ death and the Father’s raising him to new life. The message of loving care and cooperation revealed there summed up the Good News that he preached, and together they proclaimed love as the indispensable source and the imperative pattern for the world’s salvation.

I find the concluding lines of today’s short passage also charged with meaning: “To you all, then, who are God’s beloved in Rome, called to be saints, may God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ send grace and peace.” Those few lines written to the believing community in Rome are equally relevant for us. We are “God’s beloved” in Hamilton—as is everyone else here in Hamilton. God does not have favourites; God loves every one and every thing he has created. It was because “God loved the world so much that God gave his only Son… so that through him the world might be saved”.

As we heard, Paul referred to the Roman Christians, and would equally refer to us, as “called to be saints”. Let’s not be put off by the word. We are the ones who have been graced to know Jesus. And God’s purpose in calling us is so that we can spread the Good News to those who have not yet heard that they are loved nor heard that loving is the indispensable way to the world’s salvation.

God does not call us to love under our own steam — which is why Paul asked God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ to send his readers grace and peace. Grace is simply the personalised, “made to order” shape that the pure gift of God’s love takes in our concrete lives; and peace is the tangible impact on us of that personalised grace of God. The combination of God’s grace and our peace flowing from it is the energising source of every apostolic action.

Next Sunday we mark the birth of Christ. Celebrating the occasion in the ways we feel pressured to can unfortunately distract us from the beauty of the mystery that is the reason for it all. We can miss out on a wonderful opportunity. As we heard earlier in today’s Gospel of Matthew: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel, a name which means “God-is-with-us”. God is with us — and what a mystery! what a God!

Can we make time during the coming week to sit quietly, wordlessly, to still our restless imagination, and like Mary “to ponder” these things in our hearts.