4th Sunday Advent A
See commentary on Matthew 1:18-24 in Matthew 1:18-25
Homily 1 - 2004
Matthew is not interested in the details of Jesus’ birth. He is not telling a story to satisfy our curiosity. He gives no details. What, then, is he doing? Basically he is introducing the reader to the themes that will be developed at length in the body of the Gospel (like the melodies in the overture to an Opera). He is alerting us. Even in the short passage we have today, he is making a number of points.
Jesus is unique. He has been conceived through the Spirit of God in the womb of a young unmarried woman. He will be the human embodiment of God at work in the world. He will indeed be Emmanuel: God with us. He will be the human embodiment of God saving the world: he will be called Jesus: a name which means God saves (as the Gospel says: he is the one who will save his people from their sins). After centuries of preparation, promise gives way to fulfilment. There is something wonderfully reassuring in the way Matthew sees what is happening in the world.
Yet God’s action is not magical. It occurs within the millions of human interactions that make up history. Matthew quotes Isaiah. Isaiah was speaking to King Ahab at a time of imminent national disaster, assuring him that the royal Davidic bloodline would continue: his young wife would give him a successor who would live on to tell the tale. A virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel. Nothing miraculous, but to those with eyes that can see, a confirmation that God is always faithful to his promises whatever be the threat. For Matthew, with the birth of Jesus, the faithful God moves decisively once more.
Matthew underlines the fact of God’s faithfulness to his Chosen People. Joseph is to accept the child, to give him his name, and thus to situate him within squarely within the ranks of the Jewish People. (It seems that this emphasis was important for Matthew’s own Christian community. It was a mixed Jewish/Gentile community, wrestling with tensions as assumptions were gradually recognised, sorted out and let go of. It was a community where Jews felt themselves being pushed aside by the more numerous Gentile converts, and where Gentile converts felt welcome only under sufferance. In this segment of the story, Matthew insists that Jesus was the fulfilment of the promises made to the Jewish people.)
Matthew says that Joseph was a man of honour. His fiancée was pregnant, but not by him. The Law required that she be stoned to death. Joseph chose to ignore the Law, and simply to divorce her informally. While deeply respecting the Jewish Law, Matthew makes it clear, right at the beginning of his Gospel, that Law is not an absolute. As the Gospel will unfold, Jesus will be condemned for his breaking of the Law.
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.
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?
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.
Homily 5 - 2016
What was Matthew up to in shaping his story of the origin of Jesus? Unlike Luke, Matthew was a Jew; and for Jews the Jewish Law, the Torah, was highly important. In today’s translation Matthew described Joseph as a “man of honour”. More helpful, perhaps, would have been something like “law-observant”, a man who respected the Torah. And Matthew made it clear that the law-observant Joseph, by naming Jesus and thereby claiming him as his son, clearly initiated Jesus into the Jewish people. Jesus was essentially a Jew. We must not forget that; and he remained a faithful Jew all his life.
Interestingly, Joseph named the child “Jesus”. Matthew gave us the theological reason why. Yet was it, perhaps, just a happy coincidence that the name “Jesus” meant something quite important in the Aramaic language? Whatever, the name meant “one who saves from sin”. A lot of names have meanings, especially in some other cultures more than ours. [Mum and Dad named me ‘John’. In Aramaic John means, “God is gracious”, for which I am very grateful – though they had no idea of its meaning when they gave the name to me. It was simply the name of dad’s father.]
This morning I would like to reflect briefly on Jesus as the one who “saves from sin”. The word sin, in the language of the Gospels, meant “missing the mark”, or “missing the point”. Later on, Jesus made it clear that the reason why he operated the way he did was so that we might have “life to the full”. He also made it clear that we live life to the full as we “love God” with everything and “our neighbour as ourselves”. When we don’t, when we miss the point, when we sin, we cripple life for ourselves and for each other.
The point of laws, of the Torah, of moral laws, is to clarify what such living involves in practice. Unfortunately, for some reason or other, it seems easy simply to focus on practices. Love certainly involves practices but it involves considerably more than practices. It is firstly an inner attitude towards self and others, a function of the kind of person I am. To focus on outer practices and ignore the inner attitude is to miss the point. Without love, practices do not give life. They might ensure a certain order, which can be helpful and even sometimes necessary – like road laws or tax laws. But they are more a condition for than the actual content of “life to the full”.
Human persons generally seem to have a tendency to absolutise laws and to forget the attitudes they are meant to express. In doing so, we create small “g” gods everywhere. We fill our lives with a variety of obsessions and compulsions that can even look good, look virtuous, but are destructive of the freedom necessary for love. They miss the point of the commandment, “You shall not have other gods before me” – small “g” gods. Jesus, for example, insisted that, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”. That was why he healed on the Sabbath – because his healing revealed the goodness of God, in the hope that it would lead to faith and to personal growth.
Right at the beginning of his Gospel, in his story of the origins of Jesus, Matthew temporarily shone the light on the issue of law-observance [that would be worked at in greater detail in Jesus’ later public ministry]. Jesus fell foul of the professional virtuous, the Pharisees, the “culture warriors” of his day, always defensive of the law. They could not, or would not, understand his approach. As a true Jew, faithful to the Torah, he tried to focus people on the point, the essential purpose of the Torah: “life to the full” within the “Covenant people”. It eventually cost him his life.
“You shall name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
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.
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.