4th Sunday of Advent: Cycle C 21-22
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Micah 5:1-4a | Hebrews 10:5-10 | Luke 1:39-45
Pour forth, we beseech you, oh Lord, your grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
When we began this season four Sundays ago, there was an image that I talked about that was in the readings, and the image was Jesus showing his disciples, who were sitting with him outside of Jerusalem, and they were looking back at the temple, and Jesus made this announcement that this temple was going to be destroyed, not a stone left upon a stone. And he himself would somehow rebuild it, and that seemed to be such an important theme that was in that first reading, because the Old Testament talked about how all this destruction was going to come on all these people. And that was the impact of this system that had been moving in a direction not toward more integrity and authenticity but to more corruption and abuse and control, but this whole system that developed over the Old Testament times was falling apart and was supposed to fall apart. And so we have this 2,000 years of the time from Abraham until the time of Jesus to, in a sense, be imbued with and be taught that there was a way in which God wanted us to live. We couldn’t do it on our own, so we had people who were in charge who told us how to live, and we were told over and over again, “These are the rules. These are the laws.” And there were ten of them, and they were beautiful, and they were pretty simple: a good relationship with divinity and a wonderful relationship with humanity. And the nature of human beings, who were longing for a kind of perfection that they weren’t able to achieve on their own but thought they could do it by rules and regulations. They got caught up in this system that was getting more and more damaging and less and less effective as human beings evolved and changed and became more like who they were intended to be.
So just pick up that image of the old collapsing around us, and then we look at these last readings and this set of readings, and it seems to be all about this thing that’s happening, this person that’s coming, this new world that’s being created. And it’s interesting. This person that’s coming to do this is going to be very, very — how would I say it? He’s complex, this Jesus figure. Who is he? Is he just a man? Is he a man who is just filled with divinity, or is he a man so filled with divinity he’s also divine himself? It’s almost like he’s too complex for us to comprehend, and I think that is true. And so how did, then, God plan on revealing the work that Jesus was here to do? How did he do that? And what he did was made sure that this divinity part of God/man Jesus was not the focus but rather this idea of the Son of Man, a human being — that’s how you translate Son of Man is human being — that we have to look at Jesus as a human being, not as a God. And if we do that, then he becomes more clearly the image that he’s intended to be, because he is who we are to become. And he came into the world to do something that initiated a thing that we couldn’t have accomplished on our own, but what he initiated was a relationship with God that’s so intimate, so close that there’s no way we could imagine that we could ever attain the goal that we have as human beings to evolve into who God intended us to be. We could never do that without this event called redemption, and it’s complex in a way and simple in another way. Complex is we don’t understand how it could happen, how one person could make up for the sins of an entire world, but that’s what is happening. And when we’re understanding fully that this Jesus comes into the world to reveal a Father, a God Father who we never could have dreamt could exist, and he is a God who is filled with nothing, nothing but mercy and forgiveness and love and affirmation. And he had to show us what that would feel like if we had a relationship with someone like that, and that’s who Jesus becomes for his disciples and those people who began to listen to him and to be transformed by who he is. And it’s never changed. It’s the heart of Christianity. How do you allow this figure Jesus to be real enough for you to be who he really is and to be, in a sense, presented to your imagination? And if you can feel who he is and know who he is, there’s an immediate response inside of you.
I want to use that as the image of what is in the gospel. This Jesus is in the womb of Mary. She has done the thing that the heart of Christianity asks us all to do: be who she’s intended to be, live the life God has asked her to live. When he reveals to Mary who she is to become, the Mother of God, how she could have ever fathomed what that meant, how she could have ever understood it — she couldn’t. All she said was, “I don’t understand this. I don't know what it means. It is risky for me. It’s an incredible adventure you’re asking me to take on, but all right. If this is what you want of me, if this is your will, then I want it to happen to me. Then this new life is born in her. Is there something there we should pay attention to? Absolutely. It’s the only way it can happen to you and to me, to be transformed by this presence of God in us, unless we say, “We can’t figure it out. We don’t know how it’s going to work. We can’t even understand it once it’s working, but if this is what you want, if you want us to believe, as human beings, that we are entitled to or have been given the gift of the presence of God inside of us, we’ll accept it.” And that’s what she did.
And there’s Elizabeth, who’s aware somehow in a mystical way, that there is this whole thing that’s going on, and she has John the Baptist in her womb. This is an interesting story, and when Jesus, in the womb, comes into the presence of John the Baptist, in the womb, John the Baptist, leaps for joy. It’s like, “Are you kidding?” It’s really beautiful, and it’s weird, but it’s saying that there is something in this God/man Jesus that, when you anticipate his coming, when you’re open to it — and John’s life led him to a place where he was like Jesus, and they were both really upset with the temple, and it wasn’t going well, and they knew it was so abusive to people and trying to control people with rules and laws and sacrifices, wasn’t working. They both knew this, and they met, in a sense, while they were still in formation, and they were excited about this new life that was coming into the world.
It’s interesting that, when you think about the depth of Christianity and the call that it has for making us into people who are so potentially effective in terms of bringing life to the people around us, unless we have that kind of sense of the — what’s the world I want — the ease with which that happens and the spontaneity in which it happens and the effectiveness of it — when you really understand when you say yes to this God and allow him to live inside of you, people are going to change around you, and things are going to work out around you. And things that you want and long for, they appear. That’s the promise. It’s an amazing new life, and what is it taking the place of? Well, that’s what’s really fascinating about this set of readings, and I’m playing on two images. One is the Responsorial Psalm, which I love, because it’s talking about seeing God’s face. “I want to see your face, and if I see your face, I’ll be saved.” Have you ever done something wrong and had to face somebody, and you maybe tell them what you’ve done, and then you put your head down? You don’t want to look at them, because you don’t want to see their reaction. I think it’s so fascinating. When the Psalmist was caught up in this image of God’s face looking at you, and when you see who he is, and you have to first take into your imagination that he is love, that he is forgiveness, that he is every single thing that every human being longs for, in terms of a companion and a source of strength and life. He’s all of that. If you see him looking at you with that disposition, you’re going to be transformed. That’s a beautiful image of how important it is to have a vision of who God is, not through the Old Testament, not through the temple, not through the rules, regulations, all those sacrifices that had to be done to make up for sins. That is not what human beings are made for, and yet for 2,000 years, that’s what we struggled with. And it’s not unusual to see the same kind of percentage of our life, in a way, spent worrying about rules and regulations and laws and who we should be and what people want us to be and forcing ourselves into being somebody we’re not. All of that is the sign of the Old Testament, and it has to go away. It has to die.
And so one of the things we have then is someone who comes into the world who has that look, that look of God, and when Jesus looked at people — I don't know what it must have felt like. But I’m not saying it was absolutely transforming to everyone, but my point is that there was something in this God/man who was like us in all things, except for doubts and fear that this thing isn’t going to work out or whatever, but this God/man Jesus is the one who is there saying something to us that is so opposed to the whole system of religion that he was such a scandal you can’t imagine why would this be the way it worked. Why wasn’t there a nice, easy transition between the Old Testament and the New Testament? Just like everything in the Old Testament moved us to the direction, and then the New Testament comes along, and it’s just like that’s the normal thing that we would develop into. It’s like first spending most of your life in a direction that is unfulfilling and not fruitful. Is that by just accident, or is that the way it works for you and for me? Do we first, all of us, spend too much time trying to figure out who we are by doing what people expect of us, by following rules and regulations, even though we might not be religious, and we’re not talking about the regulations of a religion but the regulations of a culture, the regulations of a system, of a family, doing what you think you have to do in order to be acceptable? That’s where most of us spend most of our life until some moment when something hits us, and there’s something in us that is awakened, that leaps up and says, “Oh, my God. You mean there’s something besides this drudgery of doing what you’re supposed to do, offering —” Offering sin offerings is like going around apologizing to everybody for who you are and all that kind of stuff. He said, “No. No, that’s not it.” But it seems to me that most of us have to have this moment in time when we move from all of that. Maybe some do it very early. I didn’t do it till really late in my life. I think maybe in my 70s I began to really realize that this God that I work with, that calls me into a life with him, is not interested in my perfection, but he’s given me a body — as the scripture says today, Jesus said, “I’ve got a body, and my job is to fulfill the role of my body, my life in this world. And what I want to do is give that to people as an offering, as a gift, as a source of life that doesn’t come from me but through me, because God dwells in me.” That’s the image of Jesus. And what do we call him? What’s the word for that kind of figure in the world, a person who looks at us with nothing but love and forgiveness? It’s called peace, and that’s the first reading. This mystical creature who’s coming into the world who wants us to see him as one like us, and when we see him for who he is, when we see the look he has in his eyes, which is God’s eyes looking at us and seeing — God sees nothing but the potential of all our goodness. When we can feel that and that something is awakened inside of us, now then we’ve understood something that we’re made for. That’s what we’re made for. We’re not made for being controlled or having demands placed on us. It’s abusive. It’s abusive. So it’s amazing, when you think about it, that we find ourselves often because of the culture, because of a shadow of religion that still wants to control and make people into who they think they should be. We all struggle with that, and it comes somewhere along in our life where we say, “This is not enough.” And the worst thing we do is we walk away from religion and think, “That’s all religion ever offered me was rules and regulations.” But religion offers something so beautifully suited to who we are and so powerful and awakening someone in us that is there always, wanting to be born, wanting to be used, wanting to become an instrument of life to other people. That’s our DNA, our true DNA.
So what a wonderful thought, to say that the — ending these four Sundays with an exciting adventure before us, that we’re going to take this seriously. We’re going to take the look of God that is nothing but love and acceptance and encouragement to become who he intended us to be. We’re going to believe that with all our heart, and we’re going to find a new life. And Luke is going to help us through his eyes, what he saw, and we’ll see it, and we’ll grow. And we’ll become who we’re supposed to be. Amen.
Father, it’s hard for us to fathom the fullness of who this God/man Jesus truly is, but as we recall the moment in history when he came into this world, 2,000 years prepared the world for this coming, and now we’ve lived 2,000 years with this awareness, and we’re still slowly growing and becoming everything that this God/man has promised to be for us. So bless us with a radical openness to who he is, a courageous yes to what he calls us to be, and let us feel the peace that comes from knowing that, no matter how far we drift, no matter how many mistakes we make, he’s right there with forgiveness and understanding. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.