4th Sunday Advent C - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2015

What was St Luke up to in writing today’s story in the way he did? We have two women on centre-stage. Indeed, they had the whole stage to themselves. He talked about wombs and unborn babies, and had these babies kicking around inside these wombs. There were loud congratulations and excitement all round. In the midst of all that joyful energy God was there. God’s Spirit was in the joy, in the extended wombs and in all that obvious flesh, in the soon-to be-born prophet, John, leaping for joy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the eternally inaccessible, ultimately incomprehensible God being made flesh from the flesh of his teenage mother.

In the face of all that, joy seems hardly enough – though it certainly belonged and in no way was out of place. Yet, perhaps it was enough. Joy, after all – creative, life-giving, tangible joy – is the expression, the shape, of the two-way love that the First and Second Persons of our Trinitarian God have for each other. Their expansive, mutual love constitutes the Third Person, their Spirit.  The two women, the senior one and the teenager, were obviously full of it, alert to it, bursting with it.

Bubbling over with that joyful Spirit of God, the older woman then said to the younger one, “You are blessed. You believed that the promise made to you by God would be fulfilled.” Why did Mary believe God’s promise, while Zachariah, the priest, the professional, the expert, did not? Luke did not tell us – but he gave us a hint. Luke would soon write of Mary, “Mary treasured these happenings and pondered them in her heart”. Mary, we might say, lived in her heart. Perhaps Zachariah lived in his head. Like any priest worth his salt, he knew his catechism. While Zachariah knew all the answers, Mary knew the questions. She looked at life. She let it raise its difficulties and its doubts. She was attuned to the mysterious, elusive but reassuring presence there of the God who kept his promises.

It seems that, unlike her husband, Elizabeth also had learnt to look at life, to accept reality, to trust the presence there of the faithful God. Both women were filled with the joyful, creative, always-open-to-life, Spirit of God.

Around this time of the year, life speeds up. What a pity it would be if we missed the joy, the genuine joy – the confirmation of our alertness to the presence of God in our lives. With all the unavoidable busyness of this pre-Christmas season, it is the time above all to get out of our heads, to forget the answers, and to embrace the concrete reality of our lives, whatever its complexity. How wonderful it would be if we could allow ourselves to sense there the faithful God who, as Elizabeth and Mary knew, keeps his promise to be with us always – till the end of time.

Emmanuel! Indeed, God is with us!