Learning from Mary How to Respond to Christ’s Coming, December 20, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Mass for December 20
December 20, 2023
Is 7:10-14, Ps 24, Lk 1:26-38

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

• “Let the Lord enter! He is the King of Glory!,” we proclaimed four times in the refrain of the Responsorial Psalm. All of Advent is geared to getting us to cooperate with God, to open wide the gates for him, to make straight the paths for him to come and to use those paths to run out to meet him, greet him, be transformed by him and follow him. In today’s readings, we have a huge contrast between those who let the Lord enter and those who don’t. They help us to learn how to cooperate with what the King of Glory wants to do in us this Advent and Christmas.
• In the first reading, we see how not to respond to the Lord’s coming, how to refuse him entrance. King Ahaz, David’s 8th generation grandson, was King of Judah for 16 years about 720 years before Christ. Judah was under threat from the northern Kingdom of Israel under Pekah and the Syrians under Rezin. They wanted him to join in an alliance against the powerful Assyrian kingdom under Tiglath-Pileser III. Ahaz was just 18 years old and afraid. He was planning to form an alliance with the Assyrians against the two other kings, something that would prove disastrous for Judah, and so God sent Isaiah to him to guide him. The problem was that Ahaz didn’t want to follow Isaiah’s advice because he preferred to follow the counsel of his political advisors and the false prophets who told him what he wanted to hear rather than what God was perhaps counter-intuitively advising through his true prophet. Even when Isaiah came to guarantee that the Lord would help and save them, Ahaz didn’t want to have anything to do with it. So the Lord told him through Isaiah, “Ask for a sign from the Lord, your God; let it be deep as the nether world, or high as the sky!” When God had asked Ahaz’s ancestor Solomon — at the identical age of 18! — the same question, Solomon asked for a prudent heart to judge things according to God’s wisdom. Ahaz feigned piety, saying, “I will not ask! I will not tempt the Lord!” The reason why he didn’t want a sign was because once the sign was given, it would, in a sense, bind him to the truth, bind him to something other than what he was already intending to do. So God through Isaiah told him what sign he would give: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign: the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.” The sign would be God-with-us, a sign that would be fulfilled in so many ways through God’s presence, including through his righteous son Hezekiah, but most especially in Jesus would would literally be God-with-us. Isaiah explained how wearisome it must be for God when God wants to give us all the help we need, but we refuse. “Listen, O house of David! Is it not enough for you to weary men, must you also weary my God?”
• The one who shows us how to respond to God’s offer of help, of liberation, of peace, is the Blessed Virgin Mary. When the Archangel Gabriel came to her, she manifested how those who are full of grace, who are with the Lord who is with us, respond to God. She first asked a question about whether God was asking her to change what she had previously thought he had requested in order to fulfill his will. That’s what her query means, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” The only way that this question makes sense is if Mary had already totally consecrated herself as a virgin to God, because if she hadn’t, then she would have well known how she would conceive and bear a son: it would have been through conjugal relations with her betrothed husband, St. Joseph. She had already responded to God’s light in her previous consecration but she was humbly open to being led further in the light of God’s plan if that’s what God was asking of her. After being told that she would conceive Jesus — a name which means “God saves,” God liberates, God opens up the door of our prisons — miraculously by the power of the Holy Spirit, she luminously replied, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” She shows us very clearly how to respond to God, by placing ourselves at his service, by allowing our whole lives to develop in accordance with this word.
• Mary enfleshes the three virtues that we read about in today’s beautiful responsorial psalm. When asked, “Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord or who may stand in his holy place?,” the Psalm responds, “He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain.” To respond appropriate to God, to open wide the gates for him and let him enter, involves three things: desires, intentions and deeds. We first need to desire not what is vain, fleeting, worthless, but to desire what lasts, what is truly important; we need to long for God! Second, our heart must be pure, not filled with sin and egocentrism. Third, our hands must be clean; we must not take bribes, we must not use our hands to steal, to abuse others, but use them for deeds of love and fold them in prayer. Mary desired what God desires, wanting her whole life to develop according to his word, rejoicing and magnifying him. Her heart was pure, seeing God in ordinary circumstances; it was contemplative, treasuring all his gifts, pondering them within. And her deeds were those of love, placing herself as the Lord’s handmaid in his service, and eventually holding the Son of God in her hands and helping to raise him with maternal love. Mary wants to help us learn how to let the King of Glory enter into our thoughts, desires and actions, too.
• “Ask for a sign from the Lord, your God; let it be deep as the nether world, or high as the sky!” If we had been given this opportunity as King Ahaz was, even if Mary with her sinless hands, clean heart and holy desires had been given this possibility, none of us would have ever dreamed of asking God to send his own Son into our world, to take on our own nature, to be born for us, to be God-with-us, to set us free by suffering, and to leave himself as our food under the appearance of bread and wine until the end of time. But, as St. John Vianney used to marvel, what we never would have dreamed, God himself has done! Today let us prepare to receive the Son of the Most High, God saves, the eternal ruler of Jacob’s house, by the power of the Holy Spirit overshadowing the priest, altar and bread and wine. Let us open wide the gates to receive the King of Glory and then, like Mary, with sinless desires, pure hearts and holy deeds, let our lives develop according to God’s word.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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