4th Sunday of Advent
Homily for the 4th Sunday of Advent 2009
By Fr Steele Hartmann
Today’s Gospel is the story of Mary’s visit of to her cousin, Elizabeth. Both women are pregnant: Mary with Jesus and Elizabeth with John the Baptist. However the story stops short of Mary’s Magnificat, her response to Elizabeth’s greeting. In so doing our Gospel leaves us turned towards Mary, with those words of Elizabeth pointing us to her and saying: “Blessed is she who believed the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled” (Luke 1:45). In this she prefigures her son, John, who would later point to Mary’s son, Jesus, and say of him, “Look, there is the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29, 36).
As I sat trying to write this homily, my thoughts kept wanting to stray towards Christmas and the homily I must write for it. In a sense, that is what is wrong with the Advent season. It is a time of waiting, but we don’t like to wait. We want to be getting on with it, to be there now. But we must learn to wait, for we are an Advent people who wait for the coming of their promised Messiah. Here pregnant women have much to teach us, for they know there is no other way than to put in the time waiting for the promised one to arrive. Any attempt to short circuit is likely only to be abortive.
We are an Advent people. We are a waiting people. What, then, has this time of waiting to offer us? What sustains a woman through her pregnancy, through the nausea and discomfort, the morning sickness and the stretching, is the promise of the new life to come. We can begin to see here the meaning of Elizabeth’ blessing: “Blessed is she who believed the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” It is future oriented. A time of waiting is only a time of waiting if it is full of expectancy — anything else is only filling in time. What Advent should be for us is a reminder that we are waiting for something, a time to be mindful of the promise of the life to come.
What is this promise? St John’s Gospel that we will read on Christmas Day puts it this way: “He came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him. But to all who did accept him he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:11-12). St Paul, using pregnant imagery, puts it this way: “I maintain that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the coming glory to be revealed in us. For creation’s anxious hope is eagerly expecting the unveiling of the sons of God. For creation was subjected to futility — not willingly, but by the one who subjected it — in the hope that even creation itself would be freed from the slavery of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that all creation has been groaning with pains of expectation, like those of childbirth, until now. And not only creation, we ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, also groan within eagerly expecting sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For this hope we are saved. But hope that is seen is not hope - for who would hope for what can be seen? So, we hope for what we do not see, and with patience we eagerly expect it (Romans 8: 18-25). Again we can hear Elizabeth’s word to us this morning: “Blessed is she who believed the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.”
What is on offer, what is promised, to use St Paul’s words, is ‘sonship, the redemption of our bodies.’ We are to be born anew by the Spirit, born anew as God’s child: “Unless you are born through water and the Spirit, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God: what is born of flesh is flesh; what is born of Spirit is spirit. Do not be surprised when I say: You must be born from above. The wind blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. That is how it is with all who are born of the Spirit,” says Jesus (John 3:5-8). This redemption, this sonship, this becoming a child of God, is to do with entry into the Kingdom of God. We, who live in more democratic times far removed from the world of Kings, are apt not to appreciate what a kingdom is. A kingdom is a place where the king’s will holds sway: what the kings says or wants or does is the law. In a kingdom there is no appeal once the king has decided; his word is law. When it comes to the Kingdom of God, then, it is God’s will that holds sway.
We can know that we are not in God’s Kingdom when we can identify with St Paul: “To will good works is present in me, but to do them is not. I do not do the good I want to do, but I practise the evil I do not want. … I find, then, this principle: that to me, the one wanting to do good, evil is present. For I delight in the law of God in my innermost spiritual self, but I see a different law in my human bodily self warring against the law in my mind and capturing me by the law of sin that is in my human bodily self. Miserable man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Though I serve the law of God with my mind, with my body I serve the law of sin” (Romans 7:18-25.) In other words, it is not God’s law that we keep but our own law; it is not God’s will that holds sway, but our own will. What is on offer, what we must long for, is that time when we shall always do the good we want to do. Then shall we have entered the Kingdom of God; then shall we be born again as a child of God.
For us to enter God’s Kingdom, we must learn to let God’s word hold sway over us; we must let it take flesh in us, so to speak, that it does rule us (Jeremiah 31:33). Left to ourselves, we cannot do this; all we can do is beg for entry (Luke 11:9-10). This we do only by opening ourselves to God’s word, especially in the Scriptures. In our praying of the Scriptures our experience will be no different to that of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and of which they said, “Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). When this happens it is the Holy Spirit coming upon us with power, as the desire for new life quickens within us in a leap of joy and in which is our necessary “Yes!” for God’s child to come to birth in us (Rule of St Benedict Prologue:15; Luke 1:44). In it is the promise to which we must cling if we, like Mary, are to be blessed: we must not waver in unbelief, but be fully convinced that God is able to do what he has promised (Romans 4:20-21). When Mary asked how it could be that she would bring to birth the Son of God, the angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called the Son of God. … For nothing is impossible to God” (Luke 1:35). So it will be for us.
Our time of waiting, however, will be marked greatly by a frustration and an impatience born of our struggle to do the good we cannot do: our time is not yet. As we wait for this new life to gestate within us, what will buoy us up and what we must learn to recognise and feel and take joy in is the movement of this new life within us. In and through our frustrations we shall come to recognise the doing of good in us is not of us: it is new life, and we will know it is the Lord’s power, not our own, that brings about this good in us. We can only wonder at what we might become. The feel of this new life within is mighty to behold and the source of a great joy and strength that is capable of patiently sustaining us in our time of waiting. In our wonder at the great thing being done in us, like Mary, we shall praise God, giving him the glory, as we burst forth in our own Magnificat in our joy at knowing the Kingdom is close at hand (Rule of St Benedict Prologue:29-30; Romans 4:20; Luke 1:46ff; Mark 1:15). Such is Advent.
