Fourth Sunday of Advent (B), Conservations with Consequences Podcast, December 23, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, B, Vigil
December 23, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of the brief homily, please click below:

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us on the Fourth Sunday of Advent and on Christmas. Because the Fourth Sunday and Christmas take place this year on back-to-back days, I’d like to try to mention both in our conversation today. On Sunday this year, the Church has us ponder Mary in the mystery of the Annunciation. The Church invites us, so to speak, to climb within Mary’s womb, so that we might draw close to that womb’s Blessed Fruit as he is silently growing and try to calibrate our prayer to Mary’s contemplative heartbeat. Mary is, in a sense, Advent personified. She is the one whom God himself prepared, through her Immaculate Conception, for the incarnation and birth of his Son, the Word of God. What lessons do we learn from Mary, especially as we ponder the scene of the Archangel Gabriel’s visit to her asking if she would become the mother of the Son of God?
• The first thing is that we need to allow God to clean our interior abode, as God did so with Mary through her Immaculate Conception. God gives us that grace through baptism and confession. In this way, Mary each Advent continues the work of St. John the Baptist, gently, maternally, calling us to be free from sin so that, like her, we may welcome God within. Have you made a good confession yet this Advent?
• The second thing Mary helps us to do is to pray. She is a model of prayer. Her expectant prayer was the culmination of the centuries of supplications of the Jewish people awaiting the Messiah. She treasured everything in her heart. She longed for God. The Archangel Gabriel said to her, “The Lord is with you,” and she sought always to be with the Lord. Mary wants to help us during these days to enter her contemplative academy. May we be good students!
• The third thing Mary wants to help us learn is amazement at the mysteries we’re celebrating. As pure as she was, as much as she prayed, little could she have ever imagined that the long-awaited Messiah would be God the Son and that God the Son would be her son according to the flesh. She became for nine months the living temple of God! Sometimes, when the practice of faith becomes routine, we can lose our sense of wonder. The Church has us ponder Mary to help us rekindle the wonder of our minds and hearts at the mystery of the incarnation, not merely 2,000 years ago, but now, in the ongoing incarnation of the holy Eucharist.
• Fourth, Mary teaches us about how God’s life is meant to grow within us and change our life. Like the baby Jesus did in Mary’s life, Jesus wants to take on our flesh, to change the way we eat, sleep, walk and live, and eventually become so big that we can no longer contain him within. “What took place for Mary,” Pope Benedict once said, “can daily take place in each of us, in the hearing of the word and in the celebration of the sacraments.” It not only can take place, but is supposed to, if only we learn from Mary how to cooperate.
• So the way we need to prepare for Christmas is to relive Mary’s mystery in Christ: to live by faith, like her, to abandon ourselves to God’s love, to entrust ourselves to his plan. That’s what the Church underlines this year on the Fourth Sunday of Advent.
• That brings us to Christmas. There are four different Gospels to ponder: at the Vigil Mass, we hear St. Matthew’s version of the appearance of the angel to Joseph, affirming that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and helping us to relate to Jesus by the names Emmanuel, or “God-with-us,” and Jesus, or “God saves.” At Midnight Mass, we focus on what the Angels said and sang to the vigilant Shepherds about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. At the Mass at Dawn, we ponder how the Shepherds hastily ran to Bethlehem to pay homage to Jesus and to relate to Mary and Joseph what the angels had said to them. And at Mass during the Day, we focus on St. John’s profound words about how in the baby Jesus, “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us … and we have seen his glory.” Each of these readings are worthy of dedicating an entire retreat, not to mention a homily.
• But what I’d like to focus on is another type of consequential conversation we’re called to have this Christmas: the dialogue that is supposed to happen for us before the crèche. We live at a time in which Christmas manger scenes are so much a part of Catholic piety that many believe that they must have existed from the first centuries of Christianity. But they are an “invention” of Saint Francis of Assisi, who 800 years ago this year, created the first living nativity in the mountainous Italian village of Greccio, located about half-way between Rome and Assisi. The topography and architecture of Greccio — where Francis would frequently stay in to preach and to pray — reminded him of Bethlehem, which he had visited four years before. So with the permission of Pope Honorius III, and the help of Greccio’s chief nobleman Giovanni Veleti, Francis decided to try to bring the mystery of Bethlehem alive.
• His first biographer, Thomas of Celano, says that “of Greccio there was made as it were a new Bethlehem.” Per Francis’ instructions, Veleti arranged in a cave an ox, an ass and a manger full of straw. The townspeople came in huge numbers with tapers and torches that combined to illumine the night like the ancient star of Bethlehem. Directly over the manger, a makeshift altar was erected to celebrate Mass. It’s the only recorded time that St. Francis served as a deacon: he chanted the Gospel with “an earnest, sweet, clear and loud voice,” preached “mellifluous words concerning the birth of the poor King in the little town of Bethlehem” and with “exceeding love” called people to adore the “Bambino” of Bethlehem.
• Celano notes the impact the living nativity and the Mass had on the townspeople: “The Child Jesus had been forgotten in the hearts of many, but, by the working of divine grace, he was brought to life again through his servant Francis and stamped upon their fervent memory.” Note that the details of the birth of Christ hadn’t been forgotten in people’s heads; they had, however, failed to penetrate their hearts and lives. While they still knew the facts, devotion had grown cold. The nativity scene and the Mass — the Gospel, the homily, and the living presence of Christ in the Eucharist — combined to revivify it.
• This Christmas, as we look with gratitude to the living nativity of 1223, it’s important to remember the lessons of Greccio. For the last several years, Pope Francis has been trying to lead people to Greccio, through Greccio to Bethlehem, through Bethlehem to the Baby Jesus and from the Baby Jesus to Christ today. This past Wednesday, the Holy Father dedicated his General Audience to the octocentenary. Last month, the Vatican published a book entitled, “Christmas at the Nativity,” compiling Pope Francis’ words over the last decade about Nativity scenes. In it the Holy Father emphasizes that the crèche is a “living Gospel overflowing from the pages of Holy Scripture.” He himself has visited Greccio twice, in 2016 and 2019, and on that second occasion, he signed a beautiful Apostolic Letter on the meaning and importance of the Nativity scenes, encouraging the faithful to set them up not only in their homes but in workplaces, schools, hospitals, prisons and town squares. He urged us to use the creche both to pray and to evangelize, emphasizing, “The Christmas crèche is part of the precious yet demanding process of passing on the faith. Beginning in childhood, and at every stage of our lives, it teaches us to contemplate Jesus, to experience God’s love for us, to feel and believe that God is with us and that we are with him, his children, brothers and sisters all, thanks to that Child who is the Son of God and the Son of the Virgin Mary.”
• But I’d like to underline one more connection that both Saint Francis and Pope Francis make, because it’s essential to the Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the United States. There in the cave of Greccio, St. Francis built an altar over the manger, to show the connection between the Child Jesus —whom Mary, Joseph, the angels, shepherds, Magi and animals adored in Bethlehem — and the Eucharistic Jesus that the Church in heaven and on earth continues to worship on the altar. Pope Francis said that when the priest in Greccio “solemnly celebrated the Eucharist over the manger,” “the bond between the Incarnation of the Son of God and the Eucharist” was highlighted. There is this tight bond between the two that we should never miss or take for granted. We can say, with the wonder of the shepherds and wise men, that one who would be called “Emmanuel,” or “God with us,” by his own supremely loving decision has chosen to remain with us always until the end of time in the holy Eucharist. The One born in Bethlehem — literally “House of Bread” in Hebrew — has come as the “Living Bread come down from heaven” (Jn 6:51), so that we might eat of him and experience salvation over death. The Mass is the means Christ himself implemented, we can say, to perpetuate, revivify and advance the mystery of Bethlehem.
• So as we prepare to go to Bethlehem spiritually with the help of our manger scenes, we do so conscious that we have the privilege to do something that the shepherds, Magi, and even Joseph and Mary did not have the chance to do in Bethlehem: to receive within us and adore on the inside the One whom they only adored outside in swaddling clothes. That’s where our consequential conversation is meant to lead us. What an incredible gift! O Come, Let us Adore Him, on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, on Christmas and beyond.

These were the Gospels on which the homily was based: 

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