NewCreation

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the fourth Sunday in Advent. On this Sunday our liturgy brings us very, very close to the coming of the Son, to the coming of Emmanuel, God with us. We remember starting the reading of Advent with the distant rumblings of thunder spoken by Jesus in his temple speech. Then we have had the two Sundays of John the Baptist talking about the coming of the one who was to follow him, but as an adult. And now we have the first interaction of Jesus and John the Baptist, but in a way that's told brilliantly by Luke with so many hints of what is to come that it's well worth spending some time on. Look also at the beautiful passage from Micah which we have, and the wonderful reading about the kind of sacrifice — or undoing of sacrifice — that Jesus's life and death would turn out to be, from Hebrews. But also, if you have time, look at the introductory prayer that I put on the Praying Eucharistically website; it's on section four, because this week's prayer, written especially for these Gospel texts by some anonymous but brilliant liturgists, is truly a wonderful prayer with which to accompany the Gospel today. Anyhow, to Luke. "In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country." She has just been told by the angel Gabriel that she is to become the mother of the Lord, and she's also been told that her cousin Elizabeth, who was well past childbearing age, is now in her sixth month, pregnant with John the Baptist, as we know. And it says “she immediately sets out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country”. This has long been associated with the town of Ein Karem; it's about eight kilometers west of Jerusalem. Of course, we don't know whether that's the place or not, but the key word here I want to bring out is "with haste." Of course, this could be just, you know, a young girl's very excited to hear that her elderly cousin is with child and goes off to see her. But "with haste" — Saint Luke is always clever with these words. The Greek word is spoudē (σπουδή). She goes meta spoudēs, with haste. Now that's a relatively ordinary Greek word, but very significantly it is the word by which the Lord instructs the people to eat the Passover on the night before they flee from Egypt: with haste. That's in both Exodus and Deuteronomy — it's the hasty nature of the departure from Egypt. So there was a certain very particular sort of haste that's being suggested here: that this really is the beginning of the coming in of not just the symbolic Passover, but the real thing that is about to start. But it's also — and this is something rather beautiful — There's a very, very slight mention of this "haste" word when King David – before he's king, when David before becoming king – has an interaction with the priest of Nob called Ahimelech, and gets to eat the bread of the presence in the Temple, even though it's holy, a matter to which Jesus refers in the Gospel. But when the priest questions whether this should be done, and whether he can be lent some arm to defend himself against what is to come. David said to Ahimelech: "Is there no spear or sword here with you? I did not bring my sword or my weapons with me, because the king's business required haste." The king's business required haste. Here we have the Virgin Mary bearing the Davidic heir. She herself is of the family of David, and she's going with haste because it is the king's business. So she enters the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. She doesn't bother to talk to Zechariah, perhaps. She greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting – so Mary speaks to her ear – the child leaped in her womb. And the verb is the same verb as David dancing before the ark of the covenant. When David later welcomes the ark into Jerusalem, he strips down to his loin cloth and dances before it. So here we have John beginning his role as foreteller, beginning his role as the one who is to prepare the way, which had been foretold in Malachi, which we'll see is going to be very important. And he's beginning by dancing as David danced before the ark of the presence. The Virgin is the ark bearing the presence. “And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry”. Now Luke is very good at his "exclaiming with loud cry" words. For instance, he has the word for the cock which crows, which also is loud, and the same word is used later in Acts about the centurion Cornelius's servants, who give a loud cry outside the house of Simon the Tanner, calling Peter down. But here it's not that verb. Here it's the verb of the music made by the Levites as they welcomed the ark into the presence. So she is joining in, as it were, her son's music, her son's dancing – and she was the music. This is more evidence of the ark, the new ark, finally coming back. The ark had been lost after the collapse of the first Temple, the destruction of the first Temple. Apparently it had been hidden somewhere; no one quite knew where – perhaps in the hill country of Judah. But here it is coming back and being welcomed by John the Baptist, who must have had – if he was… must have been some Davidic element in common, if Mary was a cousin of theirs. But anyhow, so here's John the Baptist leaping like David, and Elizabeth making noise like the Levites as the ark is welcomed. She exclaims with a loud cry: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb." So this is the double blessing to indicate that something that is from the Lord is here. And then she has, "And why has this happened to me? That the mother of my Lord comes to me." So let's see what the exact… yes: "whence to me, whence to me" — "how to me" — it's not necessarily so much "why" but "how," "whence to me": who am I to deserve this, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? So here she's using a very strange phrase. She's immediately identifying that this is the person who is bearing the Lord. This is a very tough thing for her to have recognized straight off. Unless, unless, unless we remember something that is not in our current translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, because it's one of the little verses that seems to have been changed sometime between when the Qumran manuscripts were available, were written — so about 100 years before Jesus's time — and the hundreds of also years after Jesus's time in which the Jewish text, the Hebrew text, was finally made official, if you like. And this text is the famous text from Isaiah, where — let's see if I can find it here. Again, the Lord spoke to Ahaz saying — this is from Isaiah 7, it's one of our standard Advent texts — "Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven." But Ahaz said, "I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test." And then Isaiah says, "Hear then, O house of David, is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel." Okay, well what our modern translation doesn't say, which is that the ancient Hebrew manuscript, the one found at Qumran, says: "Ask a sign of the mother of the Lord your God." So that appears to have been a text that was known in that version at the time of Christ, at the time that Luke put his text together, because Elizabeth, talking to the Davidic heir, recognizes that the sign that Ahaz refused to ask for, that was announced by Isaiah, is being fulfilled in person: "the mother of my Lord" — that's there, "ask a sign of the mother of your Lord." That's some very, very fine detective work by Margaret Barker. "For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy" — leapt for joy. And again, this is a word which brings out another of the strange — in this case not changes in the Hebrew text, but simply mistranslations by us of the Hebrew text, because the very end of the prophet Malachi, which is to say really the end of the Old Testament, which starts in chapter 3: "See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple." The text which we have on February the 2nd for the presentation at the Temple. But in the very very last chapter from Malachi, you have: "See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all the evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings." Well, that's what our translation says. "You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall." That leaping from the stall – that's the same verb as Elizabeth describes her child leaping with joy. He is like the calf leaping from the stall that is about to go out. But the mistake is in this: that the Hebrew, even the version we currently have, does not say "for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings." It says "with healing in her wings." The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in her wings. The suggestion that Mary, pregnant with Jesus, is the sun of righteousness. The healing in her wings – the one who is also talked about by Micah – is coming in. And "blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord." Well, I don't know whether this is Elizabeth talking about herself or about Mary or about both of them. Blessed are the women who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord. So it's Mary's fulfillment and it's Elizabeth's fulfillment. But what they are doing is just acting out major fulfillments. That's what's going on. It's not only the pregnancies; it's the fact that it's the final coming of the one whom Malachi had prophesied, whom Isaiah had prophesied, whom David had been the predecessor of, the Levites. You see how this wonderful text is constructed so as to prepare us for what is the great birth, which is the moment when God gives birth in human form through the virgin to God, which is what we'll be seeing next Saturday evening at our Christmas Mass, the Gospel of the birth.