Homily @ Advent: Bearing

Year C / Advent / Week 4 / Sunday

Readings: Micah 5.1-4a / Ps 80 (R/v 4) / Hebrew 10.5-10 / Luke 1.39-45

Lord, make us turn to you,

Let us see your face and we shall be saved.

These words are the response in today’s Psalm. I think they aptly express our desire at this point in Advent. We have waited expectantly for a long time for Christmas to come. We want these last days of Advent to pass by quickly so we can come to Jesus in the manger.

But don’t these same words echo that more familiar everyday struggle you and I have—of trying to find and see God’s face? To look for this face amidst the ordinariness of our own lives. To look for God in the pressing concerns our families and friends have. To look for God's face in the never-ending suffering and strife so many in our world still face.

I believe we all look for God in the human realities of our living and loving, our working and studying, our praying and playing. And when we find it so difficult to see God, haven’t we cried out, "Lord, let us see your face”?

Today we are on the threshold of Christmas. No matter the quality of our Advent preparation, we are now turned more decisively toward God coming into our lives, becoming one like us, living among us as Jesus, and saving us for God as the Christ. We are eager to see this God. This is why the gurgling, smiling face of baby Jesus in the crib on Christmas morning will be for you and me reason enough to believe that God is truly Emmanuel, God-is-with-us.

But before that let us meditate on the Visitation to better appreciate this face of God.

Pregnant, Mary travels with urgent haste, and probably some discomfort, to visit Elizabeth. Mary goes to care for her cousin who is unexpectedly pregnant in her old age. They greet each other with an embrace.

In visiting, two women experience consolation and concern for one another. In embracing, their love comforts and binds them. Visiting: an image of caring and comfort. Embracing: an image of loving and belonging. 

Two images that echo the depth of God’s mercy in coming to us in Jesus. Indeed, it is Mary’s visit and her embrace with Elizabeth that leads to John in Elizabeth’s womb leaping in joy before Jesus whom Mary bears within her.

Perhaps, this is why we find the Visitation a comforting reading.  Doesn’t it remind us of such visits in our lives as: a friend repeatedly assuring us in our loneliness; a parent lovingly cradles us into life again when we experience emptiness; a colleague encouraging us with hope-filled words; and even a stranger kindly offering us her MRT seat. Don’t we find ourselves like Elizabeth in these moments, surprised by God visiting us? 

God visits us because God always remembers us, counts us worthy and loves us beyond all telling to be with us. This is the message the Visitation presents us with today: God is always present, always laboring for our good.

This joyful truth of the Visitation can now help us to sharpen our Advent focus to see God reaching out to visit us, and on Christmas morning to see even more clearly that God chooses to stay with us.  

Yes, God comes to live with us in no other place but in our earthly space. Though it is so often soiled, broken and messy, God choses to dwell in this space, and within it to love us into the fullness of life with Godself.

God’s love is not abstract, theoretical or heady. It is not a long ago action we sentimentally remember at Christmas. Neither is it a future second coming we can only attain because we have obediently ticked off all the boxes on the Catholic To Do List.  No, God’s love has concrete form: it can be felt and known in the present, and God's love is even more merciful and abundant than we can ever imagine.  

No experience of this is more palpable than when human beings embrace each other, like Mary and Elizabeth did. In this most intimate deed of connecting with one another, God’s love is experience more truly than any theology, prayer or homily can express. 

If there is a deep longing we all pine for as human beings, it is to be touched, to be held, to be embraced. We yearn for this from another, especially from the ones we love because this makes their love and concern, their friendship real for us. In an embrace, we become alive to one another. 

This is why a mother cuddling her baby girl warms our hearts; why a man cradling his dying brother moves us to tears; why a couple’s forgiving embrace makes us smile, and why the hearty hug of friends and strangers at the sign of peace makes us smile.

We have all experienced something of God in such embraces: of God giving birth to us and caring for us; of God forgiving us and laughing with us; of God loving us to no end. In these moments, God’s love is far more real than any catechism, hymn or book can convey.

We are not seeking to satisfy our physical wants or to gratify our emotional longings when we seek another’s embrace. What we are seeking for deep within us is to experience God’s love through another’s embrace.

God’s visitation and God’s embrace. These come alive because of how God chooses to come into human lives—by entering into the lives of the small and the insignificant. Mary, a young girl in a culture where men dominate. Elizabeth, a barren woman in a community that prizes fertility as God’s favour. And lowly shepherds, instead of the mighty and powerful when Jesus is born. 

All of them small. All of us small too before God because of our human faults. Yet each one of them and us is more than small in God’s eyes. In God's eyes, we are in fact always worthy to bear Jesus. Bearing him to dwell in us and bearing him to present to the world, like Mary did. 

God comes into human life today through another’s “yes” to God’s ways. This was how God once did it through Mary’s “yes”, and through her to Elizabeth in a visit and to the world in a birth.

This is why Mary and Elizabeth’s embrace cannot speak of anything less than the surprising, gratuitous gift of God in Jesus. Of God visiting us by embracing human form so as to embrace us in turn as one of us. 

In Jesus who lived amongst us, loving us as we are, we see the face of our God who saves. And in Jesus, we can turn towards God and embrace God back gratefully in a loving return of ourselves.

Indeed, in Jesus, we can believe in the Christmas truth made flesh: that we are created to be in touch with God who always desires to touch us first.

Mary proclaimed this truth in bearing Jesus to Elizabeth and Elizabeth celebrated it by welcoming Jesus. So, let us do likewise: let us bear Jesus to the many people in our lives, and even to those God is yet to send into our lives. Then, having met Jesus in us, they can say: 

Lord, you have turned to us, 

we have seen your face and we rejoice for we are saved.

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

photo: theguardian.com