Fourth Sunday of Advent (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, December 19, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent (B)
December 19, 2020

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The text that guided the homily is: 

• 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 this Sunday, when, we have the chance to ponder how to prepare well for the celebration of the Lord’s birth by focusing on the lessons we can learn from the Blessed Virgin Mary.
• On the Fourth Sunday of Advent each year, as we draw closer to Christmas, the Church has us ponder either Mary, as we do this year with her Annunciation and next year with the Visitation, or St. Joseph, upon whom the Church meditated last year with the Angel’s words to him in a dream. Mary always leads to Christ, St. Louis de Montfort taught in a phrase St. John Paul II loved, provided that we “live her mystery in Christ.” We climb within her womb, so to speak, to draw close to the Blessed Fruit of that womb as he is silently growing, and we listen to her contemplative heartbeat as it seeks to synchronize our heart to hers and Jesus’.

• This need to take on this Marian perspective is always important, because so many of us struggle to live Advent well. We spend more time shopping, or at the post office, or watching programs on Frosty or Rudolf than we do together with the Lord. Without even knowing it, we become immersed in a secular way of living December, watering Christmas down to “season’s greetings,” listening for jingling bells, and focused more on whether there will be a white Christmas than a holy one. Our souls can be touched, as they should be, by the stories of Secret Santas who go out of their way to be good to others, but we don’t spend time on how God by coming into the world to save us has given us the greatest and most generous of all time. Even this year when because of the pandemic, there will be far less time walking in malls or traveling to parties or, sadly, getting together with family members, many people are struggling to put God first. Earlier this week, too religious sisters in a convent told me that they were really struggling in Advent because they were spending so much of their days baking gifts or preparing for volunteers for their convents and apostolates that their souls were becoming dissipated.
• That’s why we all, always, need Mary’s help, especially in Advent. She is, in some sense, Advent personified. She was the one God prepared himself, through her Immaculate Conception, for the incarnation and birth of the Word of God. She wants to help us relive her mystery. What lessons do we learn from her, 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.
  • God did so with Mary through her Immaculate Conception. He does so with us through baptism and confession.
  • Mary 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.
  • In the first reading on Sunday, we will see how David wanted to build a house for the Ark of the Covenant, for God’s presence, but God instead told David he would build him a house. We know that this promise was fulfilled in David’s descendant according to the flesh, Jesus. And when the Son of God took flesh and dwelled among us he took up his first abode, his first tabernacle, in Mary’s womb, living there for the first nine months of his human life.
  • Sometimes, like David, we can be focused so much on our doing something for God that we can miss the point that God wants to do something for us. He wants to make us a temple where Jesus Christ can come to dwell in a similar way to how he dwelled in Mary. But like David and like Mary we need to cooperate. And that requires being cleansed, being “filled with grace.” We’re never going to relive Mary’s mystery in Christ without being freed from sin and filled with God.
• The second thing she helps us to do is to pray.
  • Mary is a model of prayer. Her expectant prayer was the prayer 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.
  • We’re never going to relive her mystery in Christ with prayer, without carving out the time to meditate on all God’s has done, is doing, and wants to continue to do.
  • A great prayer is the Rosary, especially during these days before and after Christmas, the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, in which we enter into Mary’s contemplative academy. Another is the Angelus, in which we meditate on the scene of the Annunciation and learn from her how to become a handmaid of the Lord who let’s God’s word be done in us.
• The third thing Mary wants to help us learn is a sense of amazement at the mysteries we’re preparing to mark.
  • 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.
  • The Word of God became man and dwelled within her, and dwelled among us.
  • She became for nine months the living temple of God.
  • Mary, therefore, can 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 Eucharist, in us when we worthily receive Jesus in the Eucharist, the greatest privilege in the world.
  • Many of us we have lost that wonder because the practice of faith has become routine. Mary can teach us how to recover the amazement we once had.
• Fourth, she teaches us about how God’s life is meant to grow within us and change our lives.
  • Pope Benedict wrote in a beautiful exhortation on the Word of God in the life and mission of the Church, “Every Christian believer, Saint Ambrose reminds us, in some way interiorly conceives and gives birth to the word of God: even though there is only one Mother of Christ in the flesh, in the faith Christ is the progeny of us all. Thus, what took place for Mary can daily take place in each of us, in the hearing of the word and in the celebration of the sacraments.”
  • Let’s break that down. There are two essential acts of motherhood. Mary was told by the Archangel Gabriel that she was to conceive in her womb and bear a Son. We, too, are called to emulate Mary in these two acts, to conceive and to give birth to Jesus.
  • Throughout the Middle Ages, in icons of the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit was depicted entering Mary through her ears, because she listened to the Word of God. In the same way, through our hearing, each of us is called to conceive God’s word, to take in in, to become impregnated with it, as the Word begins to grow within us, to take on our flesh, to change the way we eat, sleep, walk and live, just as a pregnant woman experiences all of these changes over the course of the nine months of pregnancy and beyond. Then, when the Word of God has grown within us to such a degree that we cannot contain him within, we need to give him to the light, as the Spanish say, to give birth to him in words to others and in deeds. Jesus once said, “My mother and my brothers and my sisters are those who hear the word of God and put it into practice,” and Mary shows us how to become Jesus’ mother in hearing that word and acting on it. Her whole life was a development of the words she said, “let it be done to me according to your word.”
  • I want to stress one thing that Pope Benedict said. He wrote that “what took place for Mary can daily take place in each of us, in the hearing of the word and in the celebration of the sacraments.” What took place for Mary can take place in each of us daily, through pondering God’s Word and especially through receiving the Word made flesh in the Eucharist. What an incredible gift we have, then, in the Mass!
• To relive Mary’s mystery in Christ is to live, like Mary, by faith, to abandon ourselves to God’s love, to entrust ourselves to his plan. This is the way we need to prepare for Christmas. We turn to Mary with the words of the Archangel, with the words of St. Elizabeth, with the words of the Church throughout the centuries and ask her to pray for us so that God may help us to learn and relive her mystery as a temple of God’s presence, cleansed and holy, prayerful, full of wonder and cooperative in his plans so that we, too, may be true servants of the Lord whose whole lives develop according to God’s word and will. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you! Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus!, whom we are preparing to receive on Sunday. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, that we may convert, let him grow, let him reign, so that together with you and St. Joseph and all the saints, we may adore him forever after the advent of earthly life.

The Gospel on which this homily was based was: 

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