4th Sunday Advent B - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2020

We’re in countdown mode — five days to go before Christmas comes upon us. A great way to prepare for the feast could be to recite the prayer we probably all know, the "Angelus" -- a succinct prayer, but carrying a punch. Custom was to repeat it three times a day.

“The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Spirit”. Let us look at it more closely ... The initiative is God’s, the God who is life and love and joy. But this is only another stage in a longer story that began long before.

St John’s Gospel began, declaring, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things came into being through him.” [St Paul preferred a more familiar word, the “Christ”, to John’s word “Word”. He wrote in his epistle to the Ephesians, “Before the world was made, God chose us, chose us in Christ … to live through love in his presence”].

Mary "conceived of the Holy Spirit". The Christ [or Word of God] “through whom all things were created” was alive in the womb of Mary. This was through the action of the Holy Spirit.

We first heard of the Spirit in the scriptural account of creation — when it all began. Then, the Spirit hovered over the waters [the code word for the chaos, the “not yet” cosmos. Astronomers [or cosmologists? or mathematicians?] assure us that creation began with the “Big Bang” — from which the whole universe evolved; and they tell us that that was about 13.7 billion years ago. God is patient!

The prayer continues, this time with the response made by Mary. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me according to your word”. Total trust, without hesitation — perfect openness to the plan of God. When you think of it, that God waited for the “All clear!” from Mary, is incredible. But God did. The creating God waited until creation was ready for total cooperation, the free response, of the creature. And it happened in Mary.

The prayer goes on to say, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”. The Word, the Christ, through whom the universe had been created, became physically part of it. The Word became human, became flesh, one of us — not in a royal palace, no blare of trumpets, but quietly, in a nondescript village in an occupied country, Palestine.

It took 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang for the created universe to become complex enough, developed enough, to support human life that could think and love and understand sufficiently to cooperate thoroughly with God. In Jesus, the Word of God came into the universe created as the climax and the purpose of the whole creation adventure. And it happened in the womb of Mary who said, “Yes”.

But the story does not end there. The Angelus ends with a prayer that we “be brought to the glory of his Resurrection”. We are reminded that our destiny is freely to allow God to give us a share in the Risen life of Jesus. Death is not the end. It is a step into a new way of being more totally human, into a life where we shall be enabled to see and to respond appropriately to the infinite beauty of God, and to the beauty of our selves and of everyone else made in the image of that beautiful God — which has been God’s plan for all those 13.7 billion years. Heaven: people freely choosing at last to love, no exceptions, no holding back — and enjoying it intensely. Thank you, God … and Thank you, Mary.