4th Sunday in Advent

This Sunday’s gospel text is Luke 1:26-38, and deals with the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary. I’m not big on Mary. There are far too many people who make her into a fourth member of the Trinity, who think she is God, and who have a childish (as opposed to childlike) idea about her place in salvation history. Hence, this is one of the very very few entries in my diary where Mary even rates a mention. My homily for this Sunday is this:

In the misery of a Nazi prison camp shortly before Christmas, a group of Christians turned to one of their companions. They wanted him to write something to celebrate the birth of Jesus. He was none other than the celebrated philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, and his contribution took the form of a play in which the meaning of Jesus’ birth is presented through the eyes of Mary. One of its main characters is a blind man, a would-be painter, who tries to explain what he would like to capture in his portrait of her. “No woman,” he comments, “has possessed her God in such a way as she, a tiny God whom one can take in one’s arms and cover with kisses, a God who is very warm and who smiles, a God who can be touched and who laughs. It is in one of these moments that I would paint Mary if I were an artist.”

Poignantly, Sartre himself might be described as blind, for he was a confirmed atheist. And yet as one modern theologian has said: it is “a blind man (Sartre), more than anyone else perhaps, who has helped me to see the mystery of Christmas as portrayed in the Gospels.”

One of the most memorable of gospel portrayals is the one we’ve just heard, the one which tells how the greatest event of all time took place at a particular date in history, in the midst of a particular people, a people who ever since the days of King David had kept alive the conviction that a Saviour would one day come. Above all it took place in the person of a particular woman, a real girl, in fact, who could be “deeply disturbed”, who could feel afraid and yet who had an unbreakable trust in God, an overwhelming desire that his plans should be fulfilled. It is in Mary that God chooses to dwell, of her he takes our flesh and blood; through her, in Paul’s words, the great “mystery which for endless ages was kept secret in now revealed.” It’s Paul way of telling us that in Mary’s little cottage in Nazareth God’s mighty plan for our salvation first began to be uncovered.

In a sense it had been hidden away in God—it was his secret—but now in the unborn child in Mary’s womb it is being disclosed. God has became one of us, has entered into our humanity and our history. But it is not just a romantic story: his helplessness and fragility as an unborn babe reflects the helplessness and vulnerability that will one day be his again as he lies on the cross.

I wonder did the annunciation of Mary take place in the space of a few minutes, as the gospel seems to suggest? Or could it have taken place over the course of many months—even a couple of years? Unlike our busy world which wants instant results, there is no rush with God; the one chosen is like a flower which opens up to the sun slowly, gently, without any kind of fanfare. According to an old tradition, when the angel greeted Mary it was not in her home at prayer but at the local fountain where she’d gone to draw water. And why not? It was through prayer and reflection and through the ordinary events of life that she completed the first Advent, slowly growing into the sort of person God wanted her to be, living out the implications of her response to the angel: “You see before you God’s servant, let it happen to me as you have said.”

This is the time of year when the noisy world cries out: “Only four more days to go!” But like Mary we, rather, are called to live out the implications of our faith; to seek a little silence, being still, and pondering in our hearts.” Then to go into the world to give birth to Jesus by the lives we live. And if we do, we shall not be taken by surprise: we shall be ready to receive him who is the revelation of God’s great secret.