Letting Enter the King of Glory, Fourth Sunday of Advent (A), December 18, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A
December 18, 2022
Is 7:10-14, Ps 24, Rom 1:1-7, Mt 1:18-24

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• We are a week before Christmas and the response that the Church is trying to provoke in us during this home stretch of the Advent Season is encapsulated by today’s Responsorial Psalm refrain: “Let the Lord enter; he is the king of glory.” Throughout this Psalm 24, it talks about raising gates: “Lift up your heads, O gates; rise up, you ancient portals, that the king of glory may enter.” It speaks to the preparation we need to do. We need to lift our heads, we need to open our lives, for Christ the King of glory to enter in. The psalm says that only those with clean hands and pure hearts, in other words holy deeds and intentions, will be ready to go to meet this King of Glory, be present in his holy place, receive his blessings and live in his justice. After we have heeded John the Baptist’s call to make straight the way in the remote phase of period, now in the proximate, as he draws nearer, we’re called to lift up our heads, hearts and lives so that he may fully enter. Many times, we know, we can open ourselves up too little to receive God. We try to squeeze him into a part, sometimes even a small part, of our life. God through the Psalm today is exhorting us not to hold back, but to stretch ourselves and open ourselves totally to accept God as and however he comes.

• Joseph was asked in today’s Gospel to lift high the gates by the Angel after St. Joseph had discovered that Mary was pregnant. Appearing to him in a dream, the angel told him, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.” Joseph was indeed afraid. Some commentators have piously stated that he was afraid because he knew Mary must have conceived miraculously and didn’t consider himself worthy to be associated with the unfolding of such a mystery. Most others, myself included, think that Joseph was afraid, rather, because he loved and totally reverenced Mary and couldn’t understand how she would have become pregnant except in a natural way with someone else; hence his desire to divorce her quietly so that she would be able to be with whoever the father was without being stoned to death for supposed adultery. That’s why the angel was compelled to say, “For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her.” The angel wasn’t reiterating what St. Joseph somehow already knew but giving him new information about how Mary had come to be with child. And we see that Joseph stretched himself. He lifted high the gate of his faith and love and, when we awoke, “he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home.”
• Joseph’s example is meant to inspire us all. The Church gives us this Gospel on the fourth Sunday of Advent in preparation for the birth of Christ not just because it historically preceded the birth of Jesus but so that we, too, will not be afraid to lift high our gates to take Mary and her Son into our home, into our life, now, at Christmas, and beyond. Even when we know Jesus’ origin and have no doubt whatsoever about Mary’s sinlessness, some of us can nevertheless still be afraid. We can think we’re unworthy. We can be concerned that if we receive Christ, his mother, and St. Joseph into our life not just as visitors but as permanent companions, we will out of our element, we won’t know how to behave, we’ll lose our identity, personality and distinctiveness. But the opposite is true. Christ came so that we might have life and have it to the full (Jn 10:10). Mary will love us with the love she had for her Son and that love will help to purify us of whatever discouragement, disappointment or even self-hatred we harbor. St. Joseph will protect us and provide for us like he did for the Holy Family. But we have to confront the fear to lift high the Gates to allow the King of Glory, his mother and St. Joseph in.
• The rest of today’s Gospel shows us how to relate to the King of Glory for whom we’re principally opening the gates. We can focus on the two names by which the Gospel passage tells us we’re called to embrace him. In human life, we know it’s difficult to have a meaningful conversation when we don’t know the name of the person with whom we’re speaking. It’s similar with God. God doesn’t want us trying to converse with him as some type of cosmic higher power or generic force. Throughout salvation history we see God revealing his name. He reveals himself to Moses as YHWH, “I am who am,” and further identified himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, showing he wants to have a personal relationship with each of us. In this Sunday’s Gospel of the appearance of the angel to St. Joseph, we see revealed the names with which Jesus wants us to call upon him as we welcome him, as we allow him to grow within us, as we ground our life on what he seeks to do in us.
• The first name we encounter is Emmanuel, which comes originally from the dramatic scene in today’s first reading. Isaiah the prophet goes to see the young King Ahaz of Judah during the time when the capital of Judah, Jerusalem, was being sieged by the kingdoms of Israel (Ephraim) and Syria. Ahaz was about to make an alliance with the brutal kingdom of Assyria — ancient Mesopotamia — so that the Assyrians would come to liberate Jerusalem. Isaiah went to Ahaz to tell him not to seal that deal, but to have more trust in God than in the King of Assyria. Ahaz didn’t want to listen to God’s word through the prophet, instead seeking scores of other prophets to tell him what he wanted to hear. That’s why God told Ahaz through Isaiah to ask for a sign as “deep as the netherworld or high as the sky.” All of a sudden Ahaz, who has been tempting the Lord through preparing to make this alliance, seems to get religion. “I will not ask!,” he replied. “I will not tempt the Lord!” Rather than refusing to be presumptuous, he didn’t want to ask for a sign because once it was be granted it would be much more difficult for him to ignore what the Lord had been telling him. After complaining that Ahaz was now wearying God just like he was fatiguing his people, Isaiah told him that God would give him this sign: “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall name him Emmanuel.”

• That sign was not altogether remarkable. On the surface it seemed anything but an extraordinary miracle as high as the sky or as deep as the netherworld. It’s not particularly rare that a virgin conceives a child. Throughout the centuries, there have been many children conceived on honeymoons during a young woman’s first time making love. The sign value for Ahaz would have been more in the name given to that child: Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.” That child would be a sign that God is on the side of the house of Judah, that it didn’t have to act as if God has left us alone. Regardless, Ahaz rejected the sign, ignored God’s counsel through the prophet and formed the alliance with the King of Assyria. After liberating Jerusalem from the kingdoms of Israel and Syria, Assyria made Judah a vassal kingdom, and when Assyria was defeated by the Babylonians, the Babylonians came after its vassal, took possession of Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, murdered many residents and transported those who survived off as slaves. All of that happened because Ahaz didn’t open to receive what God was telling him, the assistance God was wanting to give him. All of it sadly happened because Ahaz, and the people of Judah in general with him, rejected the sign that God was with them.
• The true and definitive fulfillment of the sign given to Ahaz, however, we see in today’s Gospel. Seven centuries after Isaiah, in describing the miraculous events of Jesus’ conception and birth, St. Matthew wrote, “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God-is-with-us.’” From the time the prophecy had been given, it was always linked to the coming of the Messiah, because two chapters later in Isaiah, there’s the description of a “child born to us, a son given to us,” who would have dominion on his shoulder and be called by others “Wonder-counselor, God-hero, Father-forever, and Prince of Peace.”  But no one had fathomed that the fulfillment would be anything more than a sign, a representative, of the God who bears all of those attributes; that God would literally fulfill that prophecy in two ways was far beyond their imagination: that a virgin would conceive a child and remain a virgin; and that “God-with-us” would actually be God with us, that God would take on our nature and come to abide with us, that he would be “descended from David according to the flesh,” as St. Paul said in today’s second reading, and yet also, simultaneously, the very “Son of God in power.” The fulfillment of this prophecy would not just be a sign that God was on their side but actually the signified presence of God at their side. This would make the sign announced by Isaiah the greatest sign of all time.
• We’re called to lift up our gates to receive this Emmanuel as the king of glory. We’re called to let him enter as God-with-us. There are many ways by which we’re called to do this, since Jesus is and remains with us in various forms — through creation, through grace, through Sacred Scripture, through his image in others, especially the poor, through those he ordained to act in his very person, and through his mystical body, the Church. But there is one way above all others by which God-is-with-us, something we’re called to ponder more deeply during the three-year Eucharistic Revival the Church in the U.S. is living. Jesus is truly and substantially present for us in his Body and Blood. The Eucharist is Emmanuel, God-with-us. The same God who was in Mary’s womb we receive in our bodies at Holy Communion. We’re called to lift up our gates and open our lives ever more to receive the King of Glory who wants to make us his Jerusalem, his Temple, his abode. That will make us, or should make us, a great sign to the world, that the Columbia student, the Columbia chaplain, will receive within, carry into the world, and give to others the eternal Son of God who is called Emmanuel.
• But Jesus’ presence has a purpose and that leads us to the second name of the Son of God by which we’re called to welcome him at Christmas and beyond. God-with-us doesn’t come among us to leave us where he finds us. He was born so that we might be reborn and live a new life with him. This is attested to in the name the angel tells St. Joseph to give to the son of Mary: “You are to name him Jesus.” This name, Jesus (the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Yeshua or Joshua) means “God saves,” and the angel tells Joseph quite clearly what God through this infant will save the Jews from: “He will save his people from their sins.” God-is-with-us, therefore, for the purpose of saving-us-from-our-sins. Note that the angel doesn’t say, “Save his people from the consequence of their sins,” — including, potentially and tragically, eternal self-separation in Hell — but “from their sins.” He wants to save us from sin, to separate us from sin, so that we may live with him, with clean hands and a pure heart, all our days.
• And just like the name Emmanuel by which the Son of God wishes us to relate to us leads us to the Eucharist he founded on Holy Thursday, so the name Jesus leads us to the Sacrament of Confession he founded on Easter Sunday night. We are called to lift up our gates to allow our merciful Redeemer in. Our appreciation for Jesus’ coming into the world is directly dependent on whether we realize we need him — that we’re sinners in need of a savior — and whether we open our hearts to receive the medicine of his mercy in the Sacrament he established to do so. That’s why throughout Advent we’ve been hearing St. John the Baptist call us to prepare the way for the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world to take away our sins. As we prepare for Christmas, it’s a time for us to open ourselves much more to the loving forgiveness of our Lord, to examine our consciences, to recognize how our hands haven’t been clean but grasping for forbidden things the evil one tempts us to consume, that our hearts haven’t been pure and seeing and loving God in all things, and to come to allow him to cleanse and purify us back to the holiness we had the day of our baptism. If you have not yet made a good confession this Advent, there’s still time. I’ll be hearing confessions each day this week and every parish in the Archdiocese of New York will have extended hours of confessions tomorrow. I encourage you not to be like the young King Ahaz and defiant before the call of God, but to accept the help that God himself gives, the two great gifts corresponding to his two names: the gift of his presence in the Holy Eucharist (Emmanuel, God-with-us) and the gift of his saving forgiveness in the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation (Jesus, God-saves). Lift high your gates and allow the King of Glory to enter!
• Today at Mass, one week before the celebration of Christmas, let us not be afraid to relate to God as he indicates. The Lord has given us something far greater than the “sign” he gave Ahaz. He has given us sacraments, efficacious signs he instituted to bring about what the signs indicate: God’s presence with us in all our difficulties in the Eucharist and God’s saving us from our sins in Confession. Let us ask the Lord for the courage as we draw near to Christmas fearlessly to lift up our gates to receive these gifts with faith and to be strengthened by him to help those we know to lift their gates high as well. Living these two Sacraments well will help us to experience the meaning and enduring reality of Christmas. And so we say to him with faith and longing: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel! O Come, Lord Jesus!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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