4 Advent, December 24, 2017
2 Sm 7:1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16; Rom 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38
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Today is the fourth Sunday of Advent, but it’s also Christmas Eve, so it’s not rushing the season to wish you a Merry Christmas!
Today’s Gospel passage tells the familiar story of the Annunciation, that moment at which the Incarnation actually occurred, and the divine first assumed human nature and began the long journey to the cross and resurrection. These stories are so familiar to us that they tend to go in one ear and out the other. But in modern times, these Bible stories have been the subject of intense debate. How should we read them?
In the nineteenth century, enlightened people first began thinking about Bible stories in a modern, sophisticated way. They realized that Luke wrote some 80 years or so after the birth of Jesus, so he wasn’t an eyewitness. Also, the story includes angels and miracles, and the enlightened people of the nineteenth century didn’t believe in angels and miracles. So they dismissed the story as the product of naïve, ignorant minds. Other people, more devoted to the Bible, staunchly argued that everything happened word for word exactly the way Luke describes.
The Catholic church does not support either of these extreme positions. As Catholics, we believe that the Bible is true, but that God does not want us to read it like modern fact-based history or a science text. This story isn’t about historical facts, such as what happened one day in Nazareth, nor is the Gospel concerned with proving the virgin birth. Rather, the story about the virgin birth is telling us who Jesus was and is. The main point of this story is that Jesus is the son of God. Not just a wise teacher, or a prophet, but the incarnation of God, who dwelt—and still dwells—with us, as God dwelt with the Israelites during the Exodus.
Tonight and tomorrow we celebrate the Incarnation, the event in which the divine became flesh and joined itself to us human beings and through us to all of creation. This wonderful event of the Incarnation begins so inauspiciously. An angel tells a girl in a small town in an unimportant province that she is to become an unwed mother. She is confused. She even points out the facts of life to the angel: she can’t be pregnant because she hasn’t been with a man. But she accepts God’s will for her. Because of her Yes, Christ begins to grow within her. This brings about a remarkable change. Soon she visits her cousin Elizabeth and the pregnant teenager sings God’s praise in her Magnificat: “All generations shall call me blessed, because He that is mighty has done great things to me.”
The Incarnation is the invitation from God for us to enter into union with him. Salvation for us means union with Christ, which is the goal of the Christian life. Mary was the first person to experience that participation, through her pregnancy. In a few minutes, we will celebrate communion, which both signifies and furthers our union with Christ, and hence with all other people and with all of creation. Our communion is our Yes to that union, which allows Christ to grow in our hearts and lives, just as Mary’s Yes enabled Jesus to begin developing within her womb.
Saint Athanasius, the great Greek church father who gave us the Nicene creed, wrote a book about the Incarnation in which he makes this surprising statement: “God became human so that human beings might become divine.” He’s not saying that you can walk on water or I can create life from nothing. Our divinity comes from our union with Christ. The Christian scriptures are full of metaphors to say this. John’s Gospel says, “I am the vine; you are the branches.” God’s energy flows to us branches from the vine, so we can bear fruit. Saint Paul says, “I live—now not I, but Christ lives in me.”
Christmas is many things. It’s presents, and family, and music, and human kindness, and Christmas trees. It’s a babe in a manger. All good things. But it’s also the feast of the Lord’s birth. May the divine Christ dwell in all our hearts this Christmas and grow in us.