4th. Sunday of Advent
(B)
(2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8-12, 14a, 16; Romans 16:25-7; Luke
1:26-38)
Today, Mother Church puts before us
two very significant readings from her sacred Scriptures, and their comparison
can show us a fact of fundamental importance concerning our relationship with
God and also provide us with sure guidance for the conduct of our spiritual
lives.
Let us look first of all at our
Gospel reading:
(The angel
Gabriel) said, "Hail, full of grace! The
Lord is with you! ..... Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with
God. Behold, you will conceive in your
womb and bear a Son, and you shall name Him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son
of the Most High.” Mary said: “How can this be, since I have no relations with a
man?”
While some scholars have thought
that Mary consecrated her virginity to the Lord in her early years, others have
disputed such an idea as being
inconceivable for a young girl living devoutly among the Jewish people who held
marriage and childbirth in such great honour, and even more so bearing in mind
the attitude to childlessness in Mary’s own family background where her cousin
Elizabeth considered childlessness to have long been ‘her reproach among men’
which the Lord had finally deigned to take away through the birth of her son
John, the future Baptiser. Moreover,
today’s readings show us that the idea of a formal consecration or dedication of
her virginity by Mary is not necessary if we can rightly follow the teaching
available to us in the first reading about King David and use it to carefully
appreciate Our Lady’s answer to the angel Gabriel.
David, you heard, had planned to
build a temple for the Lord:
When the LORD
had given King David rest from his enemies on every side, he said to Nathan the
prophet, “Here I am living in a house of cedar, while the ark of God dwells in a
tent!” Nathan answered the king, “Go, do whatever you have in mind, for the LORD
is with you.”
It was God, however, Who would build
the temple He wanted when the time was right.
Therefore He sent Nathan back to David with this message:
“Go, tell my
servant David, ‘Thus says the LORD: Should you build Me a house to dwell in?
When your time comes and you rest with
your ancestors, I will raise up your heir after you, sprung from your loins, and
I will make his kingdom firm. I will be
a Father to him, and he shall be a son to Me.
Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before Me.
In those words there is a most
important point for us to recognize and appreciate: what we do before God is essentially secondary
to the attitude in which we do it. David
was adopting a somewhat condescending attitude to God:
Should you
build Me a house to dwell
in?
David, we are told, was a man after
God’s own heart, but here he had spoken from his position of recent security,
power, and assumed personal achievement, all of which had led him to speak
‘generously’ to God.
A somewhat faint trace, it might be
thought, of the original pride that had led Adam to follow Eve into disregard of
God’s authority and providence; nevertheless, any trace whatsoever of the
original catastrophic evil would, in such circumstances and if left uncorrected,
quickly sour David’s present zeal for the glory of Israel’s God and sincere
gratitude for His goodness. Therefore
the prophet was instructed to lovingly make it clear to David, Who was doing the
leading and guiding, Who would protect and save.
Mary, on the other hand, could never
think like David of bestowing anything on God, because of her insatiable longing
to give Him glory and receive His blessings; she had no treasured virginity to
offer Him, because her total, life-long, desire to belong entirely to God, was her virginity because it was so
absolute; and that overwhelming
passion was not – like a supposed vow -- alien to Jewish aspirations, as we know
from St. Paul, who had been himself a supremely observant Jew:
Brothers and
Sisters: In regard to virgins, I have no commandment from the Lord, but I give
my opinion as one who, by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy … an unmarried woman,
a virgin, is anxious about the things of the Lord so that she may be holy in
both body and spirit, (but) she who is married cares about the things of the
world. (1 Corinthians 7:25, 34)
So, in her
reply to Gabriel, Mary can only speak from that looking-to and longing- for God
which was fundamental to her character: there had never been any question in her
mind such as ‘who shall I marry?’; and even now, hearing the angel addressing
her, no marriage-envisioning question such as ‘who has been chosen for me?’ came
to her mind, nothing but those limpidly simple words:
How can this
be, since I have no relations with a man?
Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
She had always been, and had always
longed to better-be, ‘the handmaid of the Lord’; and whereas David had spoken
generously out of his present fullness to God, Mary was complete emptiness and
total longing … with nothing to offer other than that abiding and absolute
longing for God, which we rightly call her virginity, the supreme and spotless
virginity of her immaculate being.
David lived long enough before God
in his restored humility and hope, not only to gladly look forward to, but also
to prepare for, the beginning of the fulfilment of the Lord’s promise through
his son Solomon who did indeed build an earthly Temple for the Lord in
Jerusalem. However, this first Temple
was destroyed by the Babylonians after some 350 years and was not replaced until a second and most
truly splendid Temple was later built by the wicked King Herod, who did indeed
produce a wonderful structure which amazed the world of its time but was in no
way pleasing to God in so far as it had not been built for God’s glory – as was
the case with Solomon’s temple before -- but for Herod’s own glory and the
renown of his kingdom under the watchful eyes of his imperial overlords in
Rome. And, in the event, it was those
very Roman overlords who -- as Jesus foretold -- not only destroyed, but indeed
totally obliterated, that symbol of Herod’s glory before one hundred years had
passed.
And so, God’s word to David by the
prophet had been aimed over and beyond Solomon, for it envisaged Jesus Himself,
Whose risen, glorious, Body would become the ultimate Temple of God among men: a
Temple not built by human hands, and one where Jews and pagans without
distinction would have access to the Father in the one Spirit.
The Jews said
to Him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus answered and said to them, “Destroy
this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews said, “This temple has been under
construction for forty-six years, and you will raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking about the temple of His
body. (John
2:18-21)
Consequently, our Gospel story was
all about God choosing when (in the fullness of time), by Whom (His own Son),
and through whom (the immaculate virgin Mary of Nazareth), salvation would
ultimately be offered to the human race:
Do not be
afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and
bear a Son, and you shall name Him Jesus.
He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the
Lord God will give Him the throne of David His father, and He will rule over the
house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end.
It is God alone Who gives salvation
and works wonders. However, we are by no
means excluded from His purposes, for we are called – in Jesus -- to share in
and contribute to His work. For,
although the Lord did not allow David himself to build the Temple in Jerusalem,
his desire to do so was most pleasing to Him, and therefore He rewarded David
with great blessings, the greatest of which being that He, the Lord, would build
David a house, and from that house the Messiah Himself, Israel’s supreme King,
would eventually come.
With Mary, on the other hand, her
desire was so supremely pleasing to God that it would be immediately and most
sublimely fulfilled in the way God wanted: Mary would indeed remain a virgin;
notwithstanding that however, she would give birth to a Child, her Child indeed,
but above all, the very Son of God Himself incarnate.
We find a similar pattern repeated
in the lives of certain great saints, People of God: Francis of Assisi longed to be a martyr for
Christ, he even went to preach Christ among the Muslims. Though God had His own plans for Francis, He
did make him great, and even gave him the signs of Jesus’ own martyrdom: the
stigmata! Again, St. Thérèse of Lisieux
most ardently desired to become a martyr, or else a missionary; indeed, she did
not know how to satisfy her manifold and ardent desires for God’s glory. God, however, wanted her to remain in the
solitude of an enclosed convent where she was to serve Him with whole-hearted
love in each and every one of the minutely regulated, and very ordinary, details
of her life as a nun. For all that, He
did love and respect her ardent desires, as is shown by the fact that He had her
proclaimed as the heavenly patroness of all those living, working, and dying in
the mission fields of Mother Church today.
My dear people, it is a fact that
God alone does the work of salvation, for to Him alone is the glory and
power. Nonetheless, He wills to
associate us in the work His own dear Son accomplished in human flesh and blood,
to the extent that even the bread and wine we offer Him at daily Mass must be,
and must be declared to be, made by human hands. Moreover, God does not use human beings like
tools: for, in Jesus, we are called to co-operate with Him as true children
trying to please and glorify their heavenly Father; and it is through such work
that we are enabled to receive, by the Holy Spirit, the gift of a personal share
in God’s own infinite holiness and eternal blessedness.
Since, in the work of God, there is
absolutely nothing any of us can do of ourselves, therefore, none of us can
excuse ourselves by complaining that we are less talented than others. Whereas our physical powers and mental
abilities are personally distinct and strictly limited, our spirit, on the other
hand, is capable of being tuned into the infinity of God Himself, and this
happens for each and every one of us through our exercising the freedom -- won
for us by Jesus -- to love good and reject evil. The true criterion for a faithful servant of
God is, therefore, the nature and the depth of that person’s desire for God and
the goodness He wills. What do you desire most sincerely and – ultimately
-- above all else? Do you want to make
something of your life with and for God, to love and serve Him faithfully and
supremely? Do you want, most sincerely,
to become a true Child of God in Jesus?
If you can say “Yes” to such questions, and if you can keep on aspiring
to serve Him even though, despite your efforts, you see little of real worth in
your life … if you will keep on telling God of your desire even though you have
not yet been able to hear any reply, then you will indeed be used by Him for His
purposes -- be they secret or manifest -- and you will become a disciple after
Jesus’ own most sacred heart, and in Him, a true child of the heavenly
Father.
Of course that is not easily done,
nor is it to be done in the short term, for it is a life’s work. Today, people want to see results come
quickly, that is part of the character of our modern Western society; and when,
in the spiritual life, things do not seem, are not seen, to come quickly, the
temptation for many is to give up the attempt to live life
religiously.
There are other ways of succumbing
to sin and the world however, than by openly falling away from the practise of
the Faith. Some yield to pride, and try
-- by subtle or by blatant means -- to make themselves appear holy, to put on
for themselves what they cannot wait to receive from God, seeking to establish a
reputation in the sight of men rather than humbly persevering before God Who
might seem to be ignoring them.
Those, on the other hand, whose mind
and heart are firmly centred on God, though they may, at times, be painfully
aware of their own nothingness, do not
thereby become downcast or disheartened, precisely because their mind is
always occupied with desires for His good-pleasure and glory, and thus they are
always looking forward and hoping in Him rather than despairing of
themselves.
People of God, our readings offer
sure guidance for our celebration of Christmas: following our Mother Mary who,
responding to the angel Gabriel’s God-given message, expressed her total and
unconditional longing for God, let us, welcome Jesus -- the very Word of God
made flesh -- into our lives anew this Christmas with like sentiments of love
and longing, of trust, hope and commitment:
I am the
handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to your
Word.
There is no surer way to find
Christmas joy and peace.
