Advent Four - Saying Yes to God

At last – the Christmas story as we know it starts to come into focus. Mothers and holy infants are gathering. The love of God expressed in human flesh is growing within and almost ready to emerge among us as one of us. Love is on the way. And love is the theme of the fourth Sunday in Advent. The fourth Sunday is also Mary day when we focus in on the role of Mary in the Christmas story.

You may like to read what I wrote three years ago.

Love is waiting to be born

Or you may like to read the relevant pages 29-31 of the Advent course.

Advent Year C course

This moment between Mary and Elizabeth is one of my favourite scenes in Scripture: two women greeting each other and unseen within them their infants recognising each other and leaping with joy. It is very personal and yet leads to one of the most public declarations possible; physically intimate and yet one of the most significant spiritual statements; ordinary and mythic – all at the same time. It would be easy to pass over this story in our hurry to get to the proper Christmas story – the birth scene. So it a great wisdom of our tradition that through the journey of Advent we spend a whole Sunday here with Mary and Elizabeth before the birth of their famous sons.

In many ways this is where we are as a world. The hope of love and justice is a growing dream within us, leaping with recognition and love but not yet born in our world. For those of us whose hopes for social justice and inclusion, for equity and shared abundance, that have taken cruel setbacks in recent years, this image of the dream still within may resonate. And the words of Mary remind us of a what a precious and disturbing holy one this is that we carry within and prepare to bear in the world.

Now this scene is both ordinary and extraordinary. At one level it is a very ordinary and wonderful thing that people, especially women, and particularly pregnant women do – they seek each other out for company and support.  But these women are extraordinary in the most traditional of biblical sense. Elizabeth is an older barren woman and Mary is a young virgin. There are a long line of special barren women in the Hebrew Scriptures – starting with Sarah and including Hannah.  Wherever there is a child born to a barren woman we know that God is especially at work in her life and that the child born of such a woman will have an especially important task to do. A child born of a virgin is even more special. Such stories were present in other religions of this time. Realising this has meant that I’ve stopped worrying and arguing about whether Mary was technically a virgin or not – it is not the point. The point is that the gospel writers wanted us to know that this child was special from before his conception. Unusual birth stories often belong to the great prophets, law givers, rulers of the bible and so it is deeply congruent and important that the story of Christ’s birth be both ordinary – or fully human – and extraordinary – or fully divine so that we might understand the true significance of his incarnation and life. The writer of Luke’s gospel wants us to understand that this child is important in the tradition of all the great characters of salvation in the Hebrew Scriptures and even more so!

But let’s not get ahead of our story too far for we know how it ends. Let’s savour the teaching and encouragment that is to be found in this moment. So how does this story speak to love and what can be said that is not already covered by the sentimentality of this greeting card time of year?

Firstly, Mary shows that we are to be open to love. Love that is often surprising in its appearance, its timing and its strange, and often inconvenient, gifts and demands on us. Secondly Mary teaches us about staying the distance, giving love time to grow and do its work. And thirdly living in love rather than simply doing good works – although love may lead us to do good things.

Mary, even or especially, as the mother of the Christ child did not have an easy time of love. It was confronting and frightening to be cornered by an angel and told that she was to bear a special child. It was shaming and potentially socially disastrous to be with child in her circumstances. It was vulnerable to bear a special child that existing rulers felt threatened by. And as Jesus grew in his identity as Son of God his human family clearly had some difficult moments. And then most cruelly love required Mary to stand at the foot of the cross and then to hastily prepare her son’s body for burial. And even after his resurrection and ascension we are told simply that she stayed with the apostles and continued the work of her son. Mary could not have known all of that when she said yes to the angel but she did know she was being asked something momentous.

In some ways it is like this for us. We say yes to marriage with a healthy young person and might find ourselves over time with someone quite changed by life and in very different circumstances. We say yes to a pleasant friendship and find that we are called to companion each other into some deep territory. We say yes to a particular job or vocation and find that our whole life is changed and no longer our own. Whilst it is wise to consider what we say yes to it is also true we cannot know fully what we are giving ourselves to. Yes is rather an attitude toward life than a fully informed choice.

And secondly love is a journey not a single state of being. Mary said yes to a child and found she had born her own Saviour who was her Lord as well as her beloved son.

It was both the same journey we all go on with our children from tiny dependent babies to adult separate human beings. And it was also the demanding journey of faith that we are all invited on from loving the Lord as we first understand him to the changing depths that faith leads us into. Some of those changes are welcome and full of joy and peace. And other challenges and changes are quite disturbing, especially at first. Love is always more than we bargained for.

And thirdly Mary was clearly seen by God to be a good and virtuous young woman but the woman she became was a great deal more than just good. She became both very vulnerable and strong. We are told several times that she stored all the events of her life with Jesus in her heart and remembered them, and that her soul was pierced by her love. She was emptied out and filled by love. And her personal love of Jesus became the great symbol and conduit of love for people of faith everywhere over all time. Faith is always private and universal.

And so on Mary day, on the fourth Sunday of Advent, we look to Mary and see the bearer of our Lord and a simple person of faith who said yes to God and found herself in a life changing, world changing relationship of love.

Even so, come Lord Jesus Christ.

If you want to read ahead to Christmas you can find five different links in the latest Enews.

Enews