Monday of the Fourth Week of Advent
Intention: We pray for a joyous and transforming Christmastime for our world, one that fills it with peace, justice, and good will toward all.
Today’s Gospel | Luke 1:39-45
Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”
Reflection for the Fourth Monday of Advent
In today’s Gospel, we see Mary making a long journey to see her cousin, Elizabeth. Mary is excited and anxious to tell Elizabeth of a strange and wonderful visit by an angel, and the news that she was to be the Mother of God. However, before she ever got the chance, Elizabeth greeted her by saying, in effect, that she already knew. It is a moment of great intimacy between two women who have been specially chosen to literally bear God’s plan for salvation into the world.
However, what may stand out most about this narrative is what it suggests to us about the meaning of faith. In the years to come, there will be many who will attack Jesus as a fraud precisely because of how and where and to whom he was born. How could the Messiah be the son of a peasant woman from a bump in the road like Nazareth? Their self-centered decisions about the nature of God had replaced the grace of an open relationship with God, and so they no longer knew him. The openness is what it looks like to live with faith. The self-centeredness is what it looks like to live without it.
Today, the scene between Mary and Elizabeth is replayed over and over in the human encounters of daily life. Jesus comes walking toward us unexpectedly in the form of other people for us to welcome. And many times, we do not recognize him. We make the mistake of thinking we already know him and what he looks like. Then, we turn away or we rush on past. Unlike Elizabeth, we are too busy to wait and see who is coming. Unlike Elizabeth, we are too distracted to feel an inner stirring telling us who has just arrived in our midst.
In her book Silence and Other Surprising Invitations of Advent, Enuma Okoro writes, “Openness to God demands our growing acceptance that we cannot create blueprints for our own lives. Though God’s character is unchanging, the ways of God are unpredictable, and there is a difference between arbitrariness and unpredictability.” Advent is a good time to reflect on our openness to God’s ways, especially that of his being present to us unpredictably, and how we can embrace this in a spirit of welcome and joyful greeting.
Prayer
Eternal Father, our days are filled with making things ready to celebrate the coming of your Son. In all of our hurriedness, may we make time to be still. Help us to recognize his approach in the persons and events of our lives. May our greeting be one of gratitude and of welcome, giving praise that we have been so generously blessed. We ask this of you who lives and reigns with your Son and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.”