Homily for the 4th Sunday in Advent, Year A

A teacher wants to know how each of her students celebrates Christmas. She calls on young Patrick Murphy, "Tell me Patrick, what do you do at Christmas time?" Patrick answers, "Me and my twelve brothers and sisters go to midnight Mass and we sing hymns, then we come home, and we put mince pies by the back door and hang up our stockings. Then we go to bed and wait for Father Christmas to come with toys." The teacher asks another student, "And you, Jimmy Brown, what do you do at Christmas?" Jimmy replies, "Me and my sister also go to Church with Mom and Dad and we sing carols, and after we get home we put cookies and milk by the chimney and we hang up our stockings. We hardly sleep waiting for Santa Claus to bring our toys." Realizing there was a Jewish boy in the class and not wanting to leave him out of the discussion, the teacher asks Isaac Cohen the same question, "Isaac, what do you do at Christmas?" Isaac replies, "Well, we go for a ride and we sing a Christmas carol." Surprised, the teacher asks him, "Tell us what you sing." Isaac goes on, "Well, it's the same thing every year. Dad comes home from the office. We all get into the Rolls Royce, and we drive to his toy factory. When we get inside we look at all the empty shelves and we sing, 'What a friend we have in Jesus.' Then we all go to the Bahamas."

A visitor from Mars arriving on planet earth at Christmas time would have a hard time figuring out what it is we are celebrating. With all the snowmen and icicles on our lawns and decorations, the Martian might think it is just a winter festival. With Santa Claus and his elves and reindeer everywhere, the Martian might think that Christmas is a feast in honour of a fat bearded man dressed in red. And with all the shopping, eating, drinking and exchange of presents, the Martian might think we are simply having an end-of-year holiday. People celebrate Christmas today in various ways and for various reasons. On the last Sunday before Christmas, the church offers us the second reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans to help us to ask and reflect on the important question: What are we celebrating at Christmas? What is the reason for the season?

Today’s second reading is the opening paragraph of Paul’s letter to the Romans. In this short paragraph Paul tells us about himself, about the Romans, and more importantly, what his letter is all about. Paul tells us it is all about the Good News of what God has done for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This is exactly what we celebrate at Christmas. Jesus Christ is the reason for the season. Christmas is the feast day of his birth. Who is this child whose birth the whole world celebrates? The second reading helps us to articulate an answer.

The child whose birth we celebrate at Christmas is:

a.         a child “who was descended from David according to the flesh” (verse 3). We must never forget that God acts through human beings to fulfil His purpose. The story of Christmas, therefore, is not just the story about God and Jesus but also the story about Mary and Joseph, about the shepherds and the magi, the story of how human beings cooperate with God.

b.         a child whom God Himself declared to be God’s beloved Son especially by raising him from the dead (verse 4). He is the one who speaks God’s word, the one to whom we must listen.

c.         a child through whom we receive grace (verse 5). G-RA-C-E stands for God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense . “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). This is the child through whom we receive God’s abundant blessings much more than we ever deserve.

d.         a child through whom we receive our apostleship (verse 5), that is, our calling as God’s servants. In Jesus we receive divine riches and privileges (grace), but we also receive a divine calling to serve God in our neighbour (apostleship).

As we pray for the blessing of the new-born Child at Christmas, let us also ask him to show us how we can serve God with gladness and joy all the days of our lives.

Children are great. A kindergarten teacher tells her class the Christmas story of the Shepherds and the Three Wise Men. At the end she asked them, “Now tell me, Who was the first to know about the birth of Jesus?” A little girl shoots up her hand and answers, “Mary.” Of course, Mary. How could anyone miss that. But adults miss that because adults tend to expect more complicated answers. The child’s answer is so simple and obvious that we miss it! We have this tendency to associate God with the phenomenal and the spectacular, such as the host of angels or the guiding star, so much so that we fail to notice God’s presence and action in the ordinary and normal things of life, such as in pregnancy and birth. This child’s inspired answer reminds us to take a second look at the “ordinary things of life” that we take so much for granted and see God’s hand in them.

Our gospel today begins with a seemingly casual statement: “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way …” (Matthew 1:18). But for the average Jew of Jesus’ times this statement would be a shock. Why? Because popular Jewish belief in those days did not expect the Messiah to be born of a woman as a normal, suckling baby. Though the scribes and scholars were aware of the prophecy that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem, the average person held to the popular theology which says that “Three things come wholly unexpected — the Messiah, a godsend, and a scorpion” (Sanhedrin 97a). The Messiah was expected to drop suddenly from the skies, full-grown in all his divine regalia and power. His landing space, of course, was no other than the Temple mount. Now you can understand why Satan tempted Jesus by proposing that he jump down from the pinnacle of the temple.

The Jews found it hard to reconcile these expectations with the reality of this man Jesus whom they knew to be born and raised in their midst. “We know where this man is from; but when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from” (John 7:27). They found the ordinary ways of God’s coming, God’s presence and God’s action among His people too simple to be true.

Like the Jews of old we also wait for the coming of God among us, for our Immanuel (God with us). Maybe we should take a moment and ask ourselves, how do we expect God to come among us? How does God work among us? This is necessary because sometimes the problem is not that God is not with us, the problem rather is that we do not recognize the ways of God’s presence and action among us. We are often enough like Jacob in Bethel who awoke from his sleep and exclaimed, “So the LORD is in this place – and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16).

The coming of the long awaited Messiah, the light of the world, the king of the Jews and the desire of the nations, not through clouds and lightning but through the nine-months pregnancy of a country girl, through thirty years of the normal human process of infancy, adolescence and adulthood, reminds us that God comes in ordinary, normal, daily circumstances of life. God comes to us in the people we see around us being born, growing up, ageing and dying. It is often hardest to see God in the people who are familiar to us, not to talk of in our own very selves. But if we see the incarnation of the Son of God as a bridge between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human, between the order of grace and the order of nature, between the sacred and the profane, maybe we will begin to discern the presence and action of God more and more in our daily lives.

A Nigerian proverb says, “Listen, and you will hear the footsteps of the ants.” Today we are challenged to listen and hear the footsteps of God who comes into our lives in ordinary ways, through ordinary people and at ordinary moments of our lives. No need to look up to the mountain top or the depths of the ocean, for “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

The story into which we are deposited in the middle in our First Reading today needs a little context.  King Ahaz was being attacked by neighboring kingdoms, and so like a good political ruler, he was looking to join with another kingdom to fight them off. For this reason he intended to make an alliance with the Assyrians who were not Hebrew and did not have the faith culture that the Hebrews had. Ahaz had already forsaken God, and was living a bad life, sacrificing to idols and even had murdered his own son as a sacrifice to pagan idols. Isaiah can only see trouble from a political alliance with the Assyrians and is aware of the wickedness of Ahaz, so the prophet tells King Ahaz not to make the alliance, and instead, to put his trust in God and trust that the power of God would help him defeat his enemies.

But Ahaz was not able to place his trust in God; he would rather trust human aid to accomplish what he needed. But Isaiah will not relent and asks the King to ask God for a sign.  In the same way that you make earthly alliances, make an alliance with God. Ahaz will not, so Isaiah says God is going to send you one anyway. And as a sign  God will enter history through a young women  who will give birth to a son who will bear the name Emmanuel. The name Emmanuel comes from a grouping of Hebrew words and means “God is with us”. Before this child grows to be an adult, Isaiah says that Ahaz’ enemies will have become powerless. In other words, God is saying to Ahaz: Can’t you see that I am with you.  Can’t you learn to trust in the Lord?  But Ahaz never could and dies in infamy.

What has come down to us though is the prophecy of Isaiah that a young woman (not necessarily a virgin in the Hebrew text) will conceive and bear a son whose name means “God with us”. Although it was meant for a particular situation, it has been also taken by the Christians as a prophecy of a Messiah – that a son will be conceived and that son will be God with us!

One of the things that the early Gospel writers did was to try to understand and prove that Jesus was the Messiah and that his coming had been prophesied in the Hebrew Testament. Matthew was particularly concerned with examining the Hebrew Scriptures and showing that there was a natural progression to Jesus. That is why the context of some of these prophecies is different from the context we give it today. Because of his Hebrew audience, Matthew was very careful to make sure that he used quotations from Scripture to underline the points that he was making, and so in the Gospel today, we have Matthew’s account of the beginning of the Nativity story, with a quotation or reference to Isaiah’s prophecy to Ahaz. As I see it, it doesn’t much matter to Matthew whether the story he was telling was literally or historically factual, but that he wanted to let his readers know that God came down from heaven to be with us, and he does this in an interesting, folkish way, that points directly to the Incarnation that we hold as a theological fact. Mary was to bear the son of God, not of Joseph. And since Matthew knew of the Isaiah prophecy he told a story that made Mary virginal, and her husband-to-be accepting of God’s will.  That is the truth of the story. This theological insight that Matthew presents was not his only.  We see the same idea in the Epistle of Paul to the Romans which was written before Matthew’s Gospel, even though the narrative was not fleshed out yet.

Paul says that Jesus was “promised beforehand through his Prophets in the holy Scriptures”, the Hebrew Bible, the same point that Matthew was illustrating, that he was descended from David – meaning that he was born a Jewish man from a Jewish mother, according to the flesh – that he was human, born of the flesh. But, Paul says he was the Son of God in power through the Spirit of holiness. This was the early theology.  Matthew was just putting narrative detail to the theology.

So much for the background of the readings today. Since the Word of God is for all time, it must have some importance and relevance for us today as well. Because Jesus taught in parables and the Gospels are in themselves parables or stories revealing the truth, I would like to pay closer attention to the narrative today – the story that Matthew tells about the conception of Jesus. Marriages came about differently in Jesus time than today.  Marriages were arranged by the two families involved, although the consent of the bride was taken into consideration if she was of age. When the agreement was final and the couple was betrothed, it was final and binding on the couple.  They were considered man and wife legally and religiously. The only thing different from marriage was that they lived apart for at least a year. This betrothal could only be dissolved by a formal divorce.

Divorce was allowed, but usually only initiated by the husband and was done publicly so everyone would know the reason. So Joseph is not out of line in the story when he decides he must divorce his pregnant wife. Matthew gives Joseph a very wonderful character, however.  When he finds out that Mary is pregnant and he knows he is not the father, he has such respect for her that he does not want to expose her publicly, but will do it in private, so not to shame her.

Joseph was also seen to be a man of prayer.  When Matthew says an angel came to him in a dream, it is like saying that he prayed and received an answer to his prayer. His answer is that he should not be afraid or embarrassed by the situation – that Mary is a special person and bears a special child – a boy.  He is even given a name for the child – Jesus. Jesus is a variation on the name Joshua, and bears the meaning “Lord of our salvation”. How appropriate a name for what Jesus has done for us!

Joseph listens to the angel.  He is a model of good prayer..He listens and he acts on what he hears. He does what our psalm asks us to do today: he lets the Lord enter.

This week, let us learn to listen to our angel or to God as we pray. And when we get an answer, even if it different than we expected, we need to trust in God, unlike Ahaz, and act on it. All through Advent we have been called to prepare for his coming, to rid ourselves of the things getting in the way of our relationship with God.  Let us ponder, mediate and pray. Let us listen to what is being said to us. Let the acceptance be our Christmas gift, much as Joseph listened to the angel and allowed God to enter into our world with grace and care. Soon we will have our Emmanuel – God with us – and we will know that we are never alone. God is always with us.

By Rt.Rev.Prof. Kasomo Daniel

The Bishop of The Society of St. Peter and Paul (SSPP)