Following Mary, A Missionary of Charity, Toward Christmas, Fourth Sunday of Advent (C), December 22, 2024

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year C
December 22, 2024
Mic 5:1-4, Ps 80, Heb 10:5-10, Lk 1:39-45

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Each year, on the fourth Sunday of Advent, the Church has us focus on the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Church does this not merely because Mary has an obviously unforgettable role in the birth and life of Jesus. The real reason that the Church proposes Mary to us as Christmas nears is because she is the model of how we should be living our Advent. Mary is, in some sense, advent personified. God the Father had prepared her from the first moment of her life to be a worthy mother of his Son. Like a faithful daughter of Israel, she had prayed throughout her youth for the coming of the Messiah. When she was a young girl, she discovered that she was part of God’s answer to that prayer, but in a way that would far have exceeded any Hebrew maiden’s prayers: not only would the Messiah be her son, but her son would also be God. Her “yes!” to the Archangel Gabriel launched the proximate preparation for the birth of Jesus the Messiah. Each year, on this fourth Sunday of Advent, we explicitly follow the footsteps Mary traced on that first Advent. In doing so, we’re doing more than traversing the physiological and historical events that preceded the birth of the Lord. We’re entering into Mary’s response of faith that is a guide for us along our own pilgrimage of faith. And so with the Lord, let us climb within Mary’s womb and listen to the beat of her contemplative heart, which was treasuring within this greatest of all mysteries, so that our Christmas may be as fruitful as that first Christmas.
• Today we travel with Mary to Ein Karim, the birthplace of St. John the Baptist. During the Annunciation, after the Archangel Gabriel had told Mary that the power of the Most High would overshadow her and she would conceive in her womb a Son whom she would call Jesus, Gabriel told her as well that her cousin, Elizabeth, had also conceived a son in her old age. As soon as the Archangel departed from Nazareth, Mary, too, made plans to leave. Although she was still a young teenage girl, she “went with haste” to take care of her elderly kinswoman who was pregnant for the first time. We know, today, that if a woman is pregnant in her 40s, there are many health risks. It is likely that Elizabeth was much older than that and ancient middle eastern health care was nothing to brag about. Without question, Elizabeth would have needed some help. But notice that the Angel didn’t command Mary to go to help her. He didn’t even suggest that it would be a good thing for her to go. He just stated the fact that Elizabeth was pregnant and that was enough for Mary to spring into action. Mary’s love spawned in her the desire to help out.
• Ein Karim was located 4.5 miles outside of Jerusalem, which was 60 miles from Nazareth. For Mary to get there, first she would have had to walk about 40 miles downhill into the plains of Jericho, then very steeply uphill for about 20 miles to the Holy City of Jerusalem, before crossing the Holy City and descending to Zechariah’s house. None of that apparently scared her. We don’t know if she traveled alone in the typical caravan of pilgrims. There’s no evidence that St. Joseph accompanied her, or her parents Saints Joachim and Anne. While we don’t know with whom she traveled, we do know that she journeyed with incredible faith. During her trek, there was no way she could have known humanly that she was pregnant. Jesus would still have been the tiniest embryo in her womb, probably eight or sixteen cells according to his human nature by the time she left, well before an infant had legs to kick. She could only have known she was pregnant by faith in Gabriel’s words. Doubtless along the journey, she was meditating on what the Angel said to her and how all of the prophecies of the Old Testament were being fulfilled in her. She was adoring within the One who would eventually be born, as today’s first reading from the Prophet Micah foretold, in Bethlehem-Ephrathah, whose origin is from of old, from ancient times and who would be peace incarnate, rule in Israel and shepherd his flock by the strength of the Lord and his majestic name; the One who, as we prayed in the Psalm, would make us turn to God, allow us to see his face and be saved; the One who, as the Letter to the Hebrews states, had from her taken on a body, who had assumed our humanity, in order to do his Father’s will and offer that humanity in order to make salvation possible. All of this together would lead to her explosive Magnificat, as her soul proclaimed the greatness of the Lord and Savior growing within her, the Mighty One who had done great things for her, who had looked upon her humility and exalted her, who had remembered his mercy and had come to help not only Israel his servant but the whole human race.
• In going to Ein Karim, Mary became the first missionary, the first bearer of the Good News that would change all of human history, forming Jesus to be the itinerant preacher he would become even before he had developed the tiniest of feet. Mary was able to bring incredible joy to Elizabeth and to the fetal John the Baptist, because she was bringing Christ. And Mary was able to burst out with joy in her famous hymn of praise, the Magnificat, during this scene for precisely the same reason.
• This brings us to the first of three lessons we can learn on this fourth Sunday of Advent: to bring joy to others this Christmas, we really have to bring them Christ. Jesus is the greatest gift that we can ever give to someone we love. This is something all of us need to remember especially at Christmas. We can buy kids all types of clothes and toys, but if we aren’t trying to give them the Lord Jesus, then we’re really giving them little more than monopoly money. We can send out a thousand cards and letters, but if we’re not praying for those we write that they come to the Lord, and if we’re not trying to help them to encounter Jesus with our meager words, then, to a large degree, what we’re sending is not much better than junk mail. Unless we try to bring Christ to them, we’re really not giving them anything of lasting value. Mary didn’t bring Elizabeth ancient Hebrew pregnancy textbooks; she wasn’t bringing John the Baptist a cute little circumcision outfit; she was bringing Christ and, hence, she was bringing them everything!
• Today Mary wants to bring us Christ here in the Bronx in the same way she brought him to Ein Karim. She wants us to learn from her example and to inspire us to bring her Son to others with great haste and joy this week as we prepare for Christmas on Wednesday. We all know people who need Jesus in their lives, who need his mercy, who hunger for his love and his presence, perhaps without even being conscious of it. But many of us can behave like spiritual Ebenezer Scrooges, selfishly keeping our relationship with Jesus to ourselves, and not sharing the greatest Gift we’ve every received with anyone. Mary’s example shows us the way to live Advent well, and explicitly challenges and calls us to bring Jesus to those we will meet during these days and to those we know who are in need, as well as to pray for and support the Church’s missionary work, which tries to bring Jesus to every creature, even to the ends of the earth. St. Teresa of Calcutta lived her whole life as a constant Visitation, going with haste to bring Christ and his charity to others. All of us as Christians, like Mary, like Teresa, are called to make of our life a Visitation, too.
• We see in the Gospel this Sunday that as soon as Elizabeth heard the sound of Mary’s greeting, John the Baptist leaped in her womb, Elizabeth herself was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she burst out saying: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? … And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” The Holy Spirit inspired Elizabeth to bless Mary among all women because of two things: the blessed fruit of her womb and her faith that the Lord’s words to her would be fulfilled. In other words, she was blessed because of her embryonic Savior and Son and because of her faith in him.
• That’s the second lesson we can grasp on this Advent pilgrimage with Mary: that the greatest blessings in this world are Jesus and our faith in him. These are the gifts we should be longing for this Christmas, because these are the ones that will truly make us happy. Even if we were to receive for Christmas the entire inventory of multiple Amazon warehouses, that would not be as valuable to us as the gift of God and the gift of increased faith in him. It is important for us to grasp how much God wants to be able to praise and bless us for our firm faith that all that he has promised us will be fulfilled. Mary cried out in her hymn of praise later in this scene, “All generations will call me blessed.” And that prophecy came true. We still call her blessed today, for the same reasons, because “the Lord — the blessed fruit of her womb — is with her,” and because of her faith, which is the model for every disciple’s. As we prepare for Christmas, the Lord is calling us to make these our priorities. The Father who gave us the gift of his Son that first nativity wants to give us that Son anew this Christmas, to be God-with-us, Emmanuel — but he wants us to ask for him in faith and respond to him in faith, by making the time to be with God in prayer, by saying “let it be done to me according to your word,” and by allowing the Lord’s words to be fulfilled in us in all the decisions we make.
• The last lesson that we’re called to emulate from that first Advent Mary lived is what she did at the end of the scene. As soon as Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, blessed her, Mary’s contemplative heart exploded in prayer: “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior!” Mary’s response to the blessing of God’s love in coming into this world, into her heart and into her womb, was not just faith but prayer, which is properly called faith-in-action. If God doesn’t just exist but is really God-with-us, then our response in faith should be prayer, to be-with-God. The Advent preface every priest in the world prays this Sunday stresses the irreplaceable importance of prayer in preparation for Christmas: “It is by his gift that already we rejoice at the mystery of his Nativity, so that he may find us watchful in prayer and exultant in his praise.” Mary’s heart was filled with this wonder and praise. Her soul magnified the Lord and her spirit rejoiced in God. Our soul and spirit are called to do the same. God wants to help us to magnify him, to rejoice in his love and thank him for all his blessings. Only the soul that does not magnify itself can magnify the Lord, and that can only happen when we center our lives on God and not on ourselves, or on material possessions, or anything else. If we were to ask Mary our Mother for the best way to prepare for the celebration of her son’s birth at Christmas, she would doubtless say that the most important is going to her Son in prayer.
• The same Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary in Nazareth will soon overshadow me and overshadow this altar. The same Jesus whom Mary carried in utero to her cousin Elizabeth comes to us today in Holy Communion. Through Mary’s intercession, may we do what she did after the Annunciation — after what St. Teresa of Calcutta called her first Holy Communion — and bring that Jesus out to others who so need him this Christmas, so that the incarnate Joy to the World can make them and us leap again!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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