4th Sunday Advent C

See Commentary on (Luke 1:39-44) in Luke 1:39-56


Homily 1 - 2006

A lot of us Catholics, and other Christian believers, and Muslims, too, surprisingly, honour Mary.

We call her “Blessed ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of God”. But I suspect we sometimes don’t stop to ask why we honour her as ever-virgin and as Mother of God. Sometimes we focus only on her physical virginity, and on her physical maternity.

With regard to her maternity, Jesus set us right there. Remember that incident in Luke’s Gospel where a woman in the crowd shouted out: Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked. Jesus said No! you’ve missed the point; you’ve seen only her physical motherhood. Rather: Blessed are they who hear the world of God and keep it.  Or, as Elizabeth put it in today’s Gospel: Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.

Blessed is she who heard the word of God and kept it – who let the Word of God, the whole mystery of God, of God’s will and of God’s Kingdom  - the promise of God - gestate within her and come to birth through her.

Something similar could be said of her virginity. It is not her physical virginity that is the context of her blessedness, but her spiritual virginity.  God saw to her being mother, life-bearer, God-bearer. She saw to her own being perpetually virgin.  Spiritual virginity, the virginity that matters, the virginity that we are all called to strive for: men, women, married and unmarried, means being empty... being empty towards God, being empty in order to make room for God.

What might being empty before God involve? Remember another saying of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel: Those who love their lives will lose them; those who lose their lives for my sake and for the sake of the Kingdom will find them. Being empty before God means surrendering all focus on ourselves and on our self-interest, dying to every pre-occupation with ourselves.

Becoming ever-virgin, like Mary, means emptying ourselves of our false (small g) gods, of those instinctive substitutes for (capital G) God: security, control; acceptance, respect; comfort, possessions; and the fears, doubts and anxieties that drive them.

I don’t know how you pray. I’ll tell you how many of the early monks used to pray –and an increasing number of people today are praying (most of them laypeople like yourselves). They simply sit – in faith – for a reasonable period of time, and try to empty their minds of thoughts, of feelings, desires, anxieties, etc., and of planning ahead.

And, because they believe that God really is mystery beyond reach of our thoughts or feelings, they try, in their prayer, to empty their minds even of thoughts about God, of trying to feel loved by God or loving towards God, of trying to feel God’s presence (as if they could!). As they sit there, they try to let go, too, of trying to live better, or of planning how to love God in practice.  They simply empty their minds and do nothing, other than be who they are, as they are, before the God they believe loves them.

I don’t think you ever quite succeed. You can even feel a bit of a fool - and that you are wasting your time - but the desire is  to do what you can: to be empty, that is, to be virginal, towards God. That you become life-bearer is then up to God.

Mary managed it: ever virgin, ever life-bearer. That is what is great about her.


Homily 2 - 2009

Well, it seems that the world’s leaders couldn’t really rise to the occasion. They had to compromise – and save face. They see the promise of a sustainable world, a more just world, a co-operative world – no longer a world of winners and losers, but a world where everyone can share fairly the world’s limited resources, and walk more softly on the earth … But, apparently, the price was too much for them – the loss of ever-increasing short-term profits, the slowing down of pointless consumerism, the surrender of a certain amount of national sovereignty. The call, and the possibility, were there to live more as brothers and sisters, respecting each other than as selfish competitors and as heedless exploiters – but they couldn’t quite rise to the occasion.

For many of them, especially the leaders of the world’s democracies, they chose the way they did because they knew that not to do so would run the risk of their losing the support of their constituents, of the people like you and me, who vote for them. We are all implicated. We object to the prospect of living with less, even if it means that the ones who will suffer will be the world’s poor and powerless. Present pleasure for the powerful few rules out the beckoning promise of enough for everyone.  

Community attitudes, cultural attitudes, are contagious. We learn our desires from each other.  

But, that contagion is not inevitable, not irreversible. If we can grow in self-awareness, we put ourselves in a better position to choose deliberately and from a more enlightened standpoint. We can, in that way, contribute to changing community attitudes. We can look at our own lives, become aware of our behaviours and our choices, critique them, and change accordingly. We can lessen our destructive footprint on our fragile world. What might it entail? 

We will do nothing without hope. Where does hope come from? Hope is not optimism. Hope does not come necessarily from our reading of world events and trends. Hope can come from God. It can come from the promises of God. 

But it needs to be nourished – hope is drawn, ultimately, from the heart of God. We learn our desires from the hope in God’s heart, and from the promises that God makes (that flow from God’s hope for our world). God hopes … God hopes in me. God hopes in you. God hopes in our world. 

The wonderful thing about Mary, at least as put by Luke on the lips of Elizabeth, is: Blessed is she who believed that the promises made her by the Lord would be fulfilled. Mary is blessed because she believed God’s promise, because she shared God’s hope, because she knew God’s heart – (and she had learnt God’s heart because she had listened – prayerfully). 

Mary was a true daughter of her Israelite heritage – not unlike Micah whom we heard in tonight’s First Reading. Against the backdrop of threatened invasion, of rampant injustice and incompetent leadership, Micah waited in hope for a leader who would stand and feed his flock with the power of the Lord. He himself will be peace

But, the source of his hope was his sense of God – of God who had promised. Mary was little different – blessed because she believed that the promises made her by the Lord would be fulfilled

It’s the invitation of Advent. We need to learn the heart of God, to feel the hope of God, to be people of hope in a world of people who need hope – who need to hear the promise and share the vision of our God who sent Jesus to the world because God loves the world and still hopes. 


Homily 3 -2012

Today's familiar Gospel can be quite instructive if we take the time to ponder and to allow it to touch our lives.

Two Jewish women … in the culture of their time, effectively invisible, simply because they were women; both about to be mothers for the first time.

The older of the two, Elizabeth, had lived her whole adult life as a failure - shamed in the eyes of her contemporaries in the small village where she lived because she was childless, sterile, barren.  For her, the tongues would not have kept silent.

The younger one, Mary, would soon face shame, misunderstanding and indignant condemnation because, though pregnant, she had not even started to live with her future husband.  For her, the tongues would soon be wagging.

Today's narrative shows them both engaged in dialogue, profound dialogue, but there was no one there to hear them; and even, had there been, the two women would not have been listened to because they were, after all, only women.

Elizabeth was filled with the Spirit and, under the inspiration of that Spirit, recognised Mary's still unborn child as her Lord.  At the same time, she was inspired by the same Spirit to recognise the personal specialness of Mary as the one who believed, and entrusted herself to, the promise of God, whatever might be the cost.

Today's brief passage stops short before giving us Mary's part of the dialogue, the striking prayer we have called the "Magnificat", where she outlines clearly her sense of God – holy, merciful, aligned with the powerless and the "nobodies", faithful to his promises and ready always to forgive..

And that's it! Both women eventually had their babies.  We hear nothing more from Elizabeth; and not much more from Mary.

What might we say of them?  … silent, … strong, in a context of uncertainty, inexperience and humiliation – certainly not a word of self-defence or of self-justification.  Two women, one old, one young, sensitive to each other, mutually supportive and both uncannily in touch with mystery, with God.  And both of them, though pushed out to the edges, discounted and virtually anonymous, crucial players in God's plan to turn the world around and to save it from itself.  They both believed that the promise made them by the Lord would, indeed, somehow, be fulfilled.

What might they say to us, here, in this diocese, today, reeling from revelation after revelation of sexual abuse, particularly of young boys, by former respected figures in our Church - priests and brothers; and of the inadequate response of Church authorities?

For some of us, for victims and their families, it is a time, long overdue, of truth coming out, of stories being heard and innocence being vindicated.

For most of us, we can share the relief, yet, at the same time, we feel ashamed, probably angry, and, under the media spotlight, we feel humiliated.  With a Royal Commission soon to begin its investigations, the media spotlight will not be switched off.

Some of us will drift further away from the Church - disillusioned.  Some will be defensive. 

Most of us, I hope, will stay in – bewildered, hurting … but also hoping.

Might humiliation be good for us?  

Strangely, that seems to be the constant message in our Scriptures.  Jesus was clear: Blessed are you when people abuse you and persecute you …  You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, relations and friends, and hated by all on account of my name… Your endurance will win you your lives.  And then there's Paul: I am quite content with the insults, hardships, persecutions and agonies I go through for Christ's sake – for it is when I am weak that I am strong.

But, today, let's turn back to Elizabeth and Mary.  Elizabeth had known a lifetime of humiliation.  Mary had still to encounter hers.  But for both, humiliation became a substantial component of the context where they honed their faith and sharpened their hope.  They did not fight it; nor did they try to wriggle out from it.  They absorbed it, and transformed it.  Not only could they exult in God, but they became key players in God's project for the world's redemption.

There is so much they can teach us as we, too, learn to believe that the promise made us by the Lord will be fulfilled.


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!


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.


Homily 6 - 2021

St Luke, it seems, liked to write stories — and he did it well. How many times have you reflected on this story that we have just listened to together? And here we go one more time this evening. The story does not change, but we do. At least, I hope we do, as we continue to let events and relationships touch us, particularly if we take the opportunity to reflect and to blend our experiences into the complex but unique tapestry that is our life.

How does the story leave you feeling? If we had read one more sentence from Luke’s narrative, we would have heard how Mary felt. We would have heard the first line of Mary’s Magnificat: “My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit exults in God my Saviour”. Depending on our relationship to Mary, her exulting in God could trigger our exulting in God, too. Apparently, according to Luke’s story, Mary’s presence to Elisabeth, before she had had time to say anything to her beyond greeting her, released a series of exuberant responses.

The growing child within Elisabeth’s womb, the one who would soon be given the name “John”, and who would grow up to become the Baptist, “leapt with joy”. Such things are mystery to me, but many of you would know well what she was talking about. Was it Mary’s voice that got the future Baptist leaping with joy? Or was it the presence of the Christ-child quietly developing in her womb? Or was it both? Elisabeth’s response leaves both options open.

Luke showed Elisabeth, not jumping like her unborn child, but being “filled with the Holy Spirit” and “giving a loud cry”, presumably of joy too [like her son’s]. She then proclaimed to Mary, “Of all women you are the most blessed”, followed by, “and blessed is the fruit of your womb”. No wonder she “gave a loud cry”: both were worth joyfully shouting out loudly about, and further pondering, “Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord?” What wonderful insights the Holy Spirit can give!

Luke seems to have wanted to reveal a profound synchronicity, too, between Jesus and John. Even their names will reveal a shared insight into God their Father — Jesus means “God saves”; John means “God is gracious”.

Elisabeth’s final comment makes it possible for us to fit into the scene, without calling for any special miracle. Luke had Elisabeth say of Mary, “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” How much more joy filled might our lives be if only, like Mary, we would believe the promise of God, as both John and [especially] Jesus would later insist, that God is determined “to save us”, because “God is truly gracious”.