December 24th, 2017: 4th Sunday in Advent, Year B.
2 Sam. 7:1-5, 8b-12, 1a, 16; Rom. 16:25-27; Lk 1:26-38.
AIM: To show Mary as the model of trusting faith.
“Unhappy the land that has no heroes,”
the German playwright Bertolt Brecht writes in one of his plays. Heroes
encourage us. They convince us that life is worth living. Our Catholic heroes
are the saints. They do more than encourage us. They also pray for us.
One of the greatest heroes of Jesus’
people was the man we meet in our first reading today: King David. His career
was as romantic as that of any film star or athlete today. From a lowly
shepherd boy, the youngest in his large family, David rose to be king of God’s
chosen people. On the way David had many setbacks, hard struggles against
determined enemies, and at least one fall into serious sin.
Our first reading told of David’s
desire to build a temple worthy of God.
The prophet Nathan approves of David’s proposal — until Nathan learns
that God has other plans. David would not build a house for God. God would
build a house for him — not a
structure of wood and stone, but a family, a dynasty. “Your house ... shall endure
forever,” God tells David. After David’s death, however, God’s plan seemed to
collapse. The nation over which David had ruled was carried off into exile. The
royal “house” which God has established for David seemed to have come to an
end.
In the second reading, however, Paul
says that God has kept his promise to
David. Jesus is the fulfillment of that promise. He is the “missing link” who
supplies the explanation of what had been hidden until his coming. Jesus, Paul
says, is “the revelation of the mystery kept secret for long ages, but now
manifested ... according to the command of the eternal God and made known to
all the nations.”
On this fourth Sunday in Advent,
however, it is not Jesus whom the Church places before us in the gospel, but
his mother. How much Catholics used to hear about Mary. How little we hear
about her today. Yet Mary has a message of special importance for us today: the
message of faith.
What is faith? For many Catholics, I
think, the word means those truths which we profess when we recite the Creed. Those
articles of belief are the faith. Faith has another meaning, however: a personal meaning. Faith is not merely
mental acceptance of truths. Faith is also personal
trust. The Creed itself indicates this in its opening words. Not, “We
believe that ...” but, “We believe in ...” The one we believe
in, whom we trust, is God.
We learn the meaning of the truths of faith from catechisms and
similar works. We learn faith in the sense of personal trust not from books but from people. The greatest model
of this trusting faith is the woman the Church places before us in today’s
gospel: Mary, the trusting and faith-filled mother of the Lord.
The kind of trusting faith we see in
Mary reckons with the possibility that even our best and holiest ideas of God
may be inadequate; that they must be broken and rebuilt anew. Mary models a
faith that is prepared for darkness and trial, yet is always open to God. Hers
is a faith that threw her totally upon God, permitting him to do with her and
her life whatever he would.
Yet Mary’s faith was quite modern. It
was not blind. Mary doubted and questioned. “How can this be?” Mary asked the
angel who told her she was to be the mother of God’s Son. What Mary questioned,
however, was not so much God, as her own ability to understand God and his plan for her life. Even in the
midst of
perplexity, however, Mary confessed that God knew best, even if she could not
understand what he was about: “May it be done to me according to your word,”
she told the angel.
That assent to God’s plan for her was
not a one-time thing. It had to be constantly renewed, through many sufferings.
When Mary and Joseph presented their infant Son in the Jerusalem Temple, the
aged Simeon told Mary that her Son would be “a sign which men reject,” and that
Mary herself would be “pierced with a sword” (Lk 2:35). The only story we have
of Jesus’ childhood tells of his parents’ grief at his supposed loss, when
their Son stayed behind in Jerusalem
Upon reaching manhood, Jesus left his
mother, as he demanded that his followers should leave their parents. He said
that his true mother and other relatives were not those related by blood, but
those who did his will (Lk 8:21).
Sometimes, as at the wedding in Cana ,
Jesus seemed to treat his mother roughly.
Yet even then she persevered in faith, telling the servants to “do whatever
he tells you” (Jn 2:5). At Jesus’ farewell meal with his closest friends there
was, apparently, no place for his mother — though there was a place for her the
next day, at Calvary . There, at the cross,
Simeon’s prophecy, that a sword would pierce Mary’s heart, was fulfilled. Yet
Mary went on trusting even when — as long ago — she “did not understand” (Lk
2:50).
Can there be any doubt that it is
precisely this trusting faith of Mary’s which we American Catholics need today?
Which of us can fully explain or understand all that we have heard and read in
recent years? Today, more than ever, we need the kind of faith which Mary had,
the faith she models for us: faith which continues to trust in God even amid
things we do not understand and cannot explain.
Faith in this sense is not something
we can summon up by willpower. Faith, the Catechism tells us, “is a
supernatural gift from God” (No. 179). And who can
doubt that
this faith will be given to us in the measure in which we invoke the prayer of
the woman who herself modeled this faith, whom Jesus gave as mother to his best
friend — and so to all his friends —
as he died on the cross? (Cf. Jn. 19:27) And so I invite you to supply the
conclusion to the homily, by responding to the age-old prayer based on the
angel’s words to Mary in today’s gospel:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is
with you. Blessed are you among
women and blessed is the fruit of your
womb, Jesus.
L Holy Mary,
Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of
our death. Amen.
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