A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
Readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16 Romans 16:25-27 Luke 1:26-38
My mother’s love of Christmas was quite evident. On Sundays during the holiday season, she turned our kitchen into a cookie and candy workshop. Our Christmas trees changed each year, catching Mom’s new enthusiasms. When she died, I inherited many of her Christmas decorations. So did everyone else in the family. There was a lot to inherit.
What may be the oldest piece in the collection mattered most to me. It is a music box, which came to our family as a gift when I was a small boy. At least, I think it was a gift. Why do we not ask these sorts of questions of our parents while there is still time? But that is the nature of time. It passes before we learn its purpose.
Three altar boys stand shoulder to shoulder in a circle. Their red soutanes and white surplices are trimmed in gold. One holds a candle stick; another, a songbook. The hands of the third are extended. The music box once played “Silent Night.”
My mother updated Christmas every year. As styles shifted over the decades, so did she. The music box was the only constant. It was always on the living room coffee table. We were limited in the number of times we were allowed to wind it up, but it sang out when relatives or friends visited. And of course, on Christmas Eve.
The music box has not worked in the decade or so that I have had it, but I treasure it. Every year, to see it again is to return to a time when Christmases could not possibly be merrier or more magical. Back then, Christmas was not what I made of it. It came as a gift from my parents, especially my mother.
Some people say, what is past is past. But William Faulkner was much more on the mark when he wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The past matters to us because—put simply—we are our pasts. What happened to us yesterday makes us who we are today. This is true even when the past is painful, when we would rather forget it.
The past matters to God as well, even though God does not dwell within time. Past, present, future: it is all the same to God. Each moment is equally present to God, hard as that is for us to imagine, much less to understand.
But if God stands above time, why does the past matter to God? Because God created us to dwell in time, to become who we were meant to be in time. Because God journeys with us through the days and decades of our lives.
Like Judaism before it, Christianity is a faith that speaks of a history of salvation. This means that God is more than a notion we ponder, more than a mystery always moving beyond us. We see God as acting in our collective history and our individual stories. The one who stands above and beyond time has entered it, interacts with us and, most importantly, remains with us as we journey through time.
This is why the evangelists, as they set out to proclaim the incredible news of God’s incarnation, felt compelled to link what happened some 2,000 years ago with what had gone before it.
St. Luke does not quote Israel’s Scriptures as often as the other evangelists. One could say that while St. Matthew marshals Scripture to prove a continuity with Israel’s past, St. Luke presumes upon it. To his mind, he is simply picking up the story where it left off. Indeed, the opening verse of his Gospel speaks of “the events that have been fulfilled among us” (1:1).
So, for example, Luke expects his hearers to remember the promise given to King David in 2 Samuel.
And when your time comes and you rest with your ancestors,
I will raise up your heir after you, sprung from your loins,
and I will make his kingdom firm.
I will be a father to him,
and he shall be a son to me.
Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me;
your throne shall stand firm forever (7:12-13).
In Luke’s Gospel, the Angel Gabriel makes his second set of showings in the history we call our salvation. He first appears in the apocalyptic visions of Daniel, bringing divine reassurance that the time of Israel’s persecution and suffering is nearing its end (Dan 8:16, 9:21).
As Luke understands it, we are in a new act of the same play. The Angel Gabriel returns to tell the Virgin Mary,
Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you shall name him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High,
and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father,
and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever,
and of his kingdom there will be no end (Lk 1:31-33).
For God, the past is never dead. It is not even past. There is no reason that God should be bound to history. Indeed, it makes more sense—at least to the classical minds of ancient Greece—that God should forever dwell above and beyond the world and its history. God should be the mystery that sustains both but enters neither.
But, as St. Pope Leo the Great suggested, salvation demanded that God sew up the torn fabric of our story. “The Conqueror’s victory would have profited us nothing if the battle had been fought outside our human condition.” And what is that condition? That God created us to dwell in time, to wax and wane therein. And it is God who chooses to encounter us in time, to remain faithful to us in time. Leo wrote:
To speak of our Lord, the son of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as true and perfect man is of no value to us if we do not believe that he is descended from the line of ancestors set out in the Gospel…. No mere figure, then, fulfilled the mystery of our reconciliation with God, ordained from all eternity.
Mary’s child is David’s son. Who else but God could twist time and force it to display both faithfulness and utter novelty?
Scripture records time, and Scripture addresses time. The past is preserved faithfully in words so that the Word himself might address us in the present. We need to know that God will continue to act for us and within each one of us in a way that is both faithful and free.
God does not forget. God brings fulfillment. God picks up the pieces of our lives. In our journey with God and to God, something old and something new are wedded together.
The morning I sat down to write this homily, I went to look again at my mother’s music box. I wanted my description of it to be accurate. Why not wind it a bit, one more time? It has not played in decades. What could it hurt? To my surprise, the altar servers swirled again, and the box played “Silent Night.”
