Advent VII/ IVC: Luke 1:39-45 & Canticle 15
December 22, 2024
David Mealy
May the words of our mouths
And the meditations of our hearts
And the actions of our lives
Be always acceptable in your sight,
Oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
We’ve lit the last Advent candle today, on our Seventh Sunday in Advent. It marks the end of our extended Advent season of 42 days.
That season saw a lot of change and turmoil in the world. We had elections that brought satisfaction to some and anxiety to others. There was more violence and displacement affecting the lives of those living in the Middle East, as well as ongoing violence affecting the lives of those living in the Ukraine and elsewhere. There were worrying new signs that our treatment of nature is coming back to back to bite us, like the wildfire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park during November, a few blocks from where Barbara and I were staying at the time.
Our extended Advent season has helped carry us through all of that turmoil. Through our liturgy we are graced with the healing power of penitence for the things we have done and those we have left undone, allowing us to renew ourselves as we prepare to celebrate the coming of Christ into the world.
We have created space to sit quietly and reflect with others in community, as we did last week in our Blue Christmas. And we have had a longer period to enjoy the rich music of the season.
The candle we lit today, the last one of the season, is sometimes called the Angel’s Candle. It’s not an official church term, but it fits the readings we hear during this week, which is a busy one for angels.
On this last Sunday in Advent, as we cycle through our three-year Lectionary, we hear one of three Gospel stories about the Angel Gabriel’s wondrous news that Mary will bring the Son of God into the world.
Later in the week, on Christmas morning, we will hear the angels bringing news of great joy to the shepherds and the world. And, although we don’t hear the story about Elizabeth and Zechariah and their child, the soon-to-be John the Baptist, the angel Gabriel was busy with them as well, just fifteen lines earlier in Luke’s Gospel and six months before the reading we hear today.
Each of these angel stories holds a wonderful combination of the divine and the human. The angels have received the amazing news they bring while standing in the presence of God, something Gabriel reminds Zechariah of when he doubts the news of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Yet they bring this news to humans in ways that they, and we, can understand and accept.
The angels could behave as imperious, commanding, intimidating messengers. Yet the angels are patient, almost human. They listen as Zechariah, Mary and Joseph each express their doubts and the angels talk to them, guiding them towards acceptance.
In Mary’s case, the acceptance comes through proof that a similar miracle has happened to Elizabeth. In Joseph’s case, which is told in Matthew rather than in Luke, acceptance comes through a dream. With Zechariah, Gabriel just gets impatient and makes him mute, unable to talk until the child is born. That reaction feels especially like the kind of response an exasperated human would have.
In Luke’s Gospel a few verses before the one we hear today, we hear the Annunciation, the words spoken by the Angel Gabriel to Mary preparing her for what is to come. We will hear these words again on the Feast of the Annunciation, a more timely occasion as it is celebrated nine months before Christmas.
These words were no doubt shocking ones for Mary to hear. She is to become pregnant, though nothing has happened that would cause a natural pregnancy. She is to bear a child who will inherit the throne of David, who is an ancestor of her husband Joseph. The child will be called the Son of God, his name will be Jesus, and her child will reign over a kingdom that will have no end. And all this will happen when the power of the Holy Spirit comes upon her and the power of the Most High overshadows her.
It's a lot. Gabriel recognizes she could use some reassurance and tells her this kind of thing has happened before, to Elizabeth, Mary’s relative. Elizabeth is of an age at which she would not normally have become pregnant, and yet she is six months along.
Today’s Gospel picks up just after the Angel Gabriel departs from Mary. All of this wondrous news is no doubt difficult to process, and Mary perhaps decides she could use some companionship to get her through the coming months. Maybe she figures Elizabeth could use some companionship as well, and she heads off to stay with Elizabeth.
When Mary shows up she greets Elizabeth, and her child leaps in her womb upon hearing Mary’s voice. Elizabeth, and perhaps her unborn child, understand what’s going on with Mary.
However, Elizabeth herself did not hear the news of her miraculous pregnancy directly. The angel Gabriel, in Luke’s telling, chose to tell the news instead to Zechariah rather than to Elizabeth, and then leaves Zechariah mute and unable to use his words to tell Elizabeth what he had learned. We just have to imagine that Elizabeth figures it out.
While with Elizabeth, Mary sings a song of praise, the Magnificat, that we heard as a Canticle today. In it she acknowledges God for having looked with favor on herself, a lowly servant to God. There are some wonderful lines in this song, including praising God for having “scattered the proud in their conceit.”
The power of the song is also in its acknowledgement of the favor God shows to the lowly. God lifts them up and fills the hungry with good things while also “casting down the mighty from their thrones” and sending the rich away empty.
The song acknowledges the God of the Old Testament, a God of vengeance, while also pointing to the God of compassion and love, the God embodied by Jesus, the God who speaks to Mary and Joseph through the angels with kindness and understanding.
The other angel story we hear on the last Sunday in Advent is from Matthew, where an angel appears to Joseph. This unnamed angel seems to anticipate the kind of human trouble that is likely to occur with a mysteriously pregnant fiancé and appears to Joseph in a dream, which convinces Joseph to marry Mary.
These angel stories tell different parts of one of the stories at the heart of Christianity, the arrival of the divine in human form, the Word made flesh. The stories are told in a compassionate, human way, one in which we can see ourselves in the doubts of Mary and Joseph and in the comfort found by Mary and Elizabeth in their companionship through their strange and wonderful pregnancies.
Mary is a complicated personage in the popular imagination. I was reminded of how complicated while experiencing two depictions of her recently.
One was at a show of fourteenth-century artists working in Siena, Italy, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There were many paintings of Mary with the baby Jesus, some large pieces meant for display in churches and many smaller ones painted for patrons who wished to use them in their devotions.
We’re all familiar with these iconic images of Mary in one form or another. They are beautiful paintings, though they did not reveal much about Mary, other than the artists thought she had strangely long fingers. Instead, the artworks themselves were objects intended to display the prosperity and piety of their owners. They told us less about Mary, their subject, than about those who purchased or commissioned the original works.
A very different depiction was presented by El Teatro Campesino in their production of “La Virgen del Tepeyac,” which I saw with several St. Aidanites and Franciscan brothers a couple of weeks ago. In that production, Mary works miracles. She rocks.
She appears to an Aztec man, Cuauhtlatoczin [Koaw tla toxin], who was given the baptismal name Juan Diego in sixteenth century Mexico. He has been doubting whether the “indios”, the Indigenous people, are truly children of God, because the behavior of the Catholic priests and Franciscan friars suggests otherwise.
La Virgen, who is the local manifestation of Mary, patiently talks him around – kind of like the way the angel Gabriel did with her. She persuades Juan Diego that he himself can prove that they are all children of God by getting the Bishop to build a church where she has appeared, in the indigenous community. It would be built on the site of the temple to an Aztec deity, who, she reveals, is also herself.
In the end, Juan Diego convinces the Bishop, with the help of a miracle of some decidedly non-native and out-of-season Castilian roses.
The heart of the story is Mary’s empowerment of the Juan Diego character. Her patience with him, and her confidence in him, gives him the ability to persuade the Bishop to build that church. In the end, the indigenous community sees themselves in her and, through her, in the Christian faith.
As we move deeper into the anticipation of the birth of Christ celebrated later this week, may we be surrounded by the divine compassion the angels showed for Mary and Joseph. May we, like Juan Diego, find ourselves strengthened by Mary. And may we walk together into the way of love, as the Christ who is to come teaches us.
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