4th Sunday Advent C - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2019

Three women, Mary, Elizabeth and Anna, dominate the early chapters of Luke’s Gospel – all three were good women, great women. Two of them, Mary and Elizabeth, figure in today’s incident. One man had been mentioned earlier, Zechariah, the priest, but he had got into trouble for doubting the angel Gabriel’s announcement that his old and barren wife, Elizabeth, would conceive and bear a son; and he was struck dumb for his disbelief.

It is interesting that not many women had been mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures for quite a few centuries, not since the institution of the Jewish monarchy, a thousand years before Jesus. Before that, in the early time of the patriarchs and for the next few centuries of tribal organisation, a number of significant and influential women had appeared in the narrative. But once the tribes united into a kingdom, issues of power and prestige assumed importance and women, apart from the occasional foreign wives of some of the kings, were rarely mentioned, and then only for their negative influence.

By highlighting the role of women in his story of Jesus, Luke was bucking a long-established custom – and the two in today’s incident were both quintessentially women, pregnant, and not second-class males. He repeated his description of Mary as “mother of the Lord”; and described Elizabeth as he might have described a prophet [though he did not use the word]. Elizabeth was “filled with the holy Spirit”; she was sensitive to the presence of God, not just in Israel’s unfolding story but physically, there in Mary’s womb, declaring that God was about to enact, in and through Mary, “the promise made her by the Lord”. She had the insight, too, to see the basis of Mary’s greatness lying precisely in her unquestioning faith, “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled”. Mary’s readiness to believe stood in stark contrast to the hesitancy and unbelief of Zechariah, bastion of the establishment and priest.

In a companion volume to the Gospel, “Acts of Apostles”, Luke wrote of the early history of the Church. Consistently throughout that volume, he also referred to the key role played by women in the establishment and care of the Christian communities. Yet deeply entrenched attitudes change slowly. Even before the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, women seem to have been increasingly, though not totally, excluded from significant formal roles and responsibilities.

I find it interesting that the Royal Commission into clergy sexual abuse and cover-up here in Australia suggested strongly that women be brought into the decision-making and governance structures of the local Church. I wonder if the forthcoming meeting in Rome in February of the heads of National Churches from all round the world will address this issue in any meaningful way. I also wonder how the Australian bishops at the upcoming Australian Plenary Council gatherings in twenty-nineteen and twenty-twenty will react to those issues which, surely, should figure high on the Agenda.

We in the Church often lament that society at large has lost the true meaning of Christmas. But could we be equally accused of missing much of that meaning ourselves? We become so habituated to certain attitudes and customs that we never think of reviewing them. Luke deliberately fashioned the infancy narratives in the way he did to alert his readers to the major themes that would be addressed later in the body of the Gospel itself. One of those themes clearly obvious throughout Luke’s Gospel was Jesus’ openness to and inclusion of women. Regularly enough, after one story about a man, Luke included a similar story about a woman.

Church is sorely in need of a prophet or prophets sensitive to the presence and call of God in our current situation, and mature and free enough to speak out. Elizabeth might well be a worthy patron.