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 our response in today’s Psalm. I believe they echo how many of us feel right now.
All Advent we have waited. Expectantly. Now, we are just two days away from Christmas. More significantly, we are just two days away from coming to the manger and standing before Jesus. We want to see the baby Jesus. We really want to experience Jesus being born in our hearts again.
Doesn’t our anticipation echo our everyday hope to see God’s face? To look for this face amidst our everyday life and interactions? To look for this face of God in the pressing concerns our families and friends have and the never-ending suffering and strife our world still faces? To look for God’s face in the best, the brightest, the many blessed moments we live in?
Yes, we all look for God in the realities that make up our living and loving, our working and studying, our praying and playing. And when we cannot see God, don’t we cry out, "Lord, let us see your face”?
No matter how we have prepared ourselves during Advent, the 4th Sunday of Advent always demands that we turn ourselves more decisively toward God. Toward a God who will come into our lives. Come to be one like us. Come to be with us. Come for our salvation.
We have every right then to be expectant, eager and enthusiastic today.
This God come will come in the person of Jesus. The gurgling, smiling face of baby Jesus in the manger is how we will first see him. And he will grow up to serve us and to die for us so that we may love. This is why Jesus is the Christ – God’s Saviour for the world. Indeed, we can believe that Jesus is truly Emmanuel, God-is-with-us.
Today’s gospel story about the Visitation helps us to see more clearly this face of God.
A pregnant Mary travels with urgent haste, and some discomfort, to visit Elizabeth who is unexpectedly pregnant in her old age. Mary visits to care for her cousin. They greet each other with an embrace.
In visiting, two women experience care and concern for one another. In embracing, their love consoles and binds them together. These images of visiting and embracing reveal the depth of God’s mercy for us. It comes through Jesus, with Jesus, in Jesus. Elizabeth recognised this when Mary visited and embraced her. John the Baptist also recognised this when he lept for joy at Jesus’ coming in Mary’s visit.
The Visitation story should remind us of similar visits in our lives. Of a friend who assures us in our loneliness. Of a parent who lovingly cradles us into life again when we are despairing. Of a colleague encouraging us with hope-filled words. Even of a stranger who kindly offers 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. God simply wants to be with us.
The Visitation helps us to see more clearly how God will always turn and come to us – come simply and truly to care for our wellbeing and us. Come really to love us.
Christmas morning sharpens this focus even more: God did not just come; God stayed among us and continues to stay with us.
Have you and I considered how remarkable God’s choice is? Our world is soiled, broken and messy so often and in so many ways and places by sin. Yet God chooses to dwell with us in our imperfect world to love us into the fullness of life.
We have all felt God’s love concretely in life and we continue to feel it profoundly every day. And when we do, I believe we all know how God's love is even more merciful and abundant than we can ever imagine.
The most palpable way humans experience this is when we embrace each other like Mary and Elizabeth did. This is the most intimate deed to connect with one another.
We all have a deep longing to touch and be touched, to hold and be held. We yearn for this from another, especially from those we love because this action 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. Why the hearty hug of friends and a strong handshake among churchgoers at the sign of peace make us smile.
We have all experienced something of God in such embraces. Of God coming to birth in 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.
These embraces have nothing to do with satisfying our physical wants or gratifying our emotional longings for someone. Instead, they have everything to do with experiencing God’s love through another’s loving embrace.
God’s visitation and God’s embrace. These come alive because God chooses to come into human lives through the people in our lives.
Often times, God comes to us through the lives of the small, the insignificant, the ones we ignore. Like Mary, a young girl in a culture where men dominate. Like Elizabeth, a barren woman in a community that prizes fertility as God’s favour. And like lowly shepherds who live and work on the margins of society.
All of them small. All of us are small too in the eyes of others who judge us for our faults and condemn us for our sinfulness. Yet each one of them and each one of us is more than small in God’s eyes.
In God's eyes, we are in fact worthy for God to come to us in Jesus. We are invited to bear Jesus in us by letting him dwell in us and to bear Jesus to the world by presenting him like Mary did.
But we can bear Jesus only when we allow God to come to us. This is why we must always do as Mary did: to say ‘yes’ to God’s coming. When we do this, we will learn how Jesus is indeed the face of a God who is madly in love with us because his singular obsession is to be with us and through us to save everyone, ourselves included. In Jesus, moreover, we can amazingly make a loving return of ourselves to God: by turning our lives to God and embracing God wholeheartedly.
Indeed, in Jesus, we learn the truth about God’s act of Creation. God created us to be in touch with Him because God always desired to touch us first. Mary proclaimed this truth as she bore 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. Let us make this our Christmas prayer, but, more so, our Christmas gift to one and all. 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 Church of the Transfiguration, Singapore
photo: organiclifestylemagazine.com
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