Advent 4

Readings: Is 7:10-14; Rom 1:1-7; Mt 1:18-24

VIDEO

King Ahaz had a problem,
but he also had a plan to solve it.
Ahaz was the young ruler of Judea,
the nation that was the southern fragment
of the kingdom that King David had established
but his descendants had failed to keep intact.
Ahaz’s problem was that Israel, 
the northern fragment of David’s former kingdom,
was under threat from the Assyrian empire
and Israel’s king was pressuring Ahaz 
to join in an alliance to repel the Assyrians.
This was a problem because Ahaz saw the obvious:
Assyria was going eventually to crush the Israelites
and, if he allied with Israel,
the Assyrians would crush the Judeans as well.
But the Israelites were threatening war 
against Ahaz and the Judeans
to get them to join the fight 
against the Assyrians,
so some sort of war seemed inevitable.

If you can’t follow all these ancient 
near eastern political intrigues, 
which make the intrigues of Game of Thrones
seem like kid stuff,
don’t worry and just trust me 
when I say Ahaz had a problem.
But he also thought that he 

had a solution to his problem: 
offer appeasement to the Assyrians
and make his nation subject to their empire
in exchange for protection from the Israelites
and letting him remain in power.

In today’s first reading we hear Isaiah
counseling a different path for Ahaz: 
neither alliance with the Israelites
nor subjection of his people to the Assyrians,
but rather trust in the Lord—
the Lord who had rescued his people in the past
and promised them rescue in the future.
Isaiah tells him to ask 
for a sign from the Lord,
any sign he wants,
to assure him of God’s protection.
But Ahaz replies with fake piety:
Oh no, I would never be so presumptuous!
But what he really means is that 
he trusts the Assyrians 
more than he trusts the Lord,
particularly since they will turn 
a blind eye to his transgressions, 
which God has denounced earlier in Isaiah,
saying that Ahaz was “crushing my people,
and grinding down the faces of the poor” (3:15).
Even more than trusting the Assyrians,
Ahaz trusted his own cleverness,
his own ability to work the angles of geopolitical intrigue.

So Ahaz submitted to the Assyrians rather than to the Lord,
even taking silver and gold from the Temple treasury
to offer tribute to the Assyrian King, Tiglath-pil’eser,
and adopting Assyrian religious practices.
According to the second book of Chronicles,
Ahaz’s cleverness and intrigues did not pay off:
“Tilgath-pil’eser, king of Assyria, did indeed come to him, 
but to oppress him rather than to lend strength” (28:20).
But Isaiah says that though Ahaz had rejected God’s offer
and was wearisome both to God and to God’s people,
God would still send a sign of his love to comfort his people:
“the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,
and shall name him Emmanuel.”

Joseph also had a problem,
a seemingly smaller problem than Ahaz,
but a problem nonetheless,
not a Game of Thrones-sized problem
of international political intrigue
but a domestic problem:
Mary, to whom he was betrothed,
was pregnant, and he was not the father.
Joseph had a problem,
but he also had a plan to solve it.
Now Joseph’s plan, unlike that of Ahaz,
did not involve deception or betrayal of God,
for, unlike the wicked Ahaz,
Joseph was “a righteous man”;
more than that, he was a merciful man.
So rather than publicly accuse Mary of adultery
and subject her to shame and possibly death,
as the Law entitled him to do,
he decided to discreetly end the betrothal.
It was a righteous plan, 
indeed a merciful plan.
But it was his plan, 
and God had a different plan.
For the child to be born to Mary
was the sign promised long ago through Isaiah:
“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,
which means ‘God is with us.’”

An angel tells Joseph in a dream
not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife,
for God knew that it is fear that leads us
to cling to our own plans,
whether wicked or righteous,
rather than embracing God’s plan,
it is fear that leads us
to try to control the people and things
that are the circumstances of our lives,
rather than trust the sign
that God truly is with us.
And Joseph does as the angel bids him,
not simply because he was a righteous man
or a merciful man,
but because he was a faithful man
who trusted that God’s plan
was greater than any plan 
that a human being could devise,
he was a man who truly believed
that God is with us,
and being a faithful man 
made him a courageous man,
and he opened his heart and home
to the Virgin and her child.

And what about us?
We too have our problems and our plans.
Chances are, most of us don’t have 
geopolitical problems like Ahaz
or wicked plans to solve them.
We are probably more like Joseph,
with family-related problems,
or work-related problems,
or school-related problems,
and our planned solutions 
are probably more-or-less righteous.
But the key question is not
whether they are wicked or righteous, 
but whether they are our plans or God’s.

Ahaz had a problem and a plan,
but it was not God’s plan.
Joseph had a problem and a plan,
but it was not God’s plan.
We have problems and plans,
but are they God’s plans?
The challenge posed 
by the Good News that God is with us
is to set aside our plans and enter the new world
that the birth of Christ opens to us,
to set aside our desire to control our problems
by controlling people and things around us,
to set aside fear and let God work in us
deeds that surpass mere human righteousness,
deeds that surpass mere human mercy.

As the mystery of God becoming flesh
bears down upon us 

in these final days of Advent,
let us pray that we, like Joseph, 
might be set free from our own plans
so that we can see, as he saw, 
the sign of God’s love 
in the child of the Virgin,
and take him, as he did, 
into our homes and our hearts,
so that God, in his mercy,
might have mercy on us all.

Advent 4

Reading: Isaiah 7:10-14; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-24

VIDEO

I often end the introductory theology course
that I teach at Loyola University
by asking the students 
how they would spend their time
if they knew that the world was ending 
in twenty-four hours.
A few, in an obvious attempt to curry favor,
say they would pray or go to confession.
But most give more honest answers,
and many of their answers are unsurprising:
spending time with family and friends,
traveling to a place they’ve always wanted to see
or revisiting a place they love,
maxing-out their credit card on a shopping spree
or going skydiving.

This year, one student said she would forgive
those who had hurt her in her life.
She said that she has been told by others
that while she forgives, in the sense of moving on,
she never forgets who it is who has hurt her
and she cuts them ruthlessly out of her life
so they can never hurt her again.
But, she said, if the world were ending
she thought she could really let all that go.
When I asked her why that was,
she said that she would no longer be afraid
that those who had hurt her in the past 
could hurt her again in the future.

Her words sounded a theme 
common in my student’s answers:
they don’t do what they really want to do
because they are afraid.
They are afraid 
that if they do not follow the safe path
of degrees and careers and societal expectations
then they won’t be able to make their lives secure,
to control what happens to them,
to keep pain and sorrow at bay.
But the prospect of the world’s end,
while in one sense terrifying,
in another sense frees them from fear
because it frees them from the illusion of control;
it frees them to live their remaining hours differently.
In this one student’s case, the difference
is between a simulated, half-hearted forgiveness
that is focused on managing hurt
and a forgiveness that is genuinely freeing
both for the one who forgives
and for the one who is forgiven.

I thought of her words as I reflected 
on today’s story of Joseph.
The angel in Joseph’s dream does not simply
offer Joseph an explanation of Mary’s pregnancy
that exonerates her of wrongdoing.
Rather, the angel tells Joseph, “Do not be afraid 
to take Mary your wife into your home.”
Do not be afraid of what the future holds.
Do not be afraid to plumb the depths of mercy.
Do not be afraid,
because the world’s time has grown short,
and the world you know is about to end.
Not, of course, in a chronological sense.
After all, here we are over 2000 years later.
But the world we seek to manage and control
even as it runs ruthlessly toward death,
is about to be brought to an end 
by the birth of Emmanuel—
God who is with us.
The angel announces 
not simply the birth of a child
but the birth of a new world 
and the death of an old one.

In the face of that world’s end,
rather than putting Mary aside,
Joseph puts aside his fear 
and his desire for control
and in mercy welcomes Mary.
St. John Chrysostom says
that when Joseph does this,
“It is like the sun not yet arisen, 
but from afar more than half the world 
is already illuminated by its light.”
The light of mercy that will flood the world
with the birth of Emmanuel
is already appearing in Joseph’s act
of grace and mercy.

And for us who live 
on the near side of that birth,
how much more ought we to live 
lives of fearless mercy?
St. Paul tells us that 
“whoever is in Christ is a new creation: 
the old things have passed away; 
behold, new things have come.”
To believe that Jesus Christ is Emmanuel,
is to believe that the light of God is even now 
pouring into the darkness of our fears,
and bringing the world ruled by fear to an end.
To believe that God was in Christ 
reconciling the world to himself
is to be freed from the task
of making our lives secure,
for it is to believe that even now,
within the dying shell of the old world
a new world is ceaselessly being born,
a world of grace and mercy.

So I ask you, what would you do
if you knew the world was ending 
in twenty-four hours? 
Would you not do that thing 
that is most important?
Would you not spend that time
on acts that can endure beyond this world,
on acts of grace and mercy?
And what is keeping you
from doing those things now,
on this day?
For the world of our fears is ending,
and God is calling us to step into
the world of Emmanuel,
the world of the God who is with us.
Let us pray that God, 
who calls us to mercy,
will have mercy on us all.

 

Advent 4

Readings: Isaiah 7:10-14; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-24

In today’s Gospel,
Joseph finds himself in a delicate situation;
the pregnancy of Mary, his betrothed,
has put him into quite a quandary.
He knows that the baby is not his
and so he reasonably (though wrongly) presumes
that the father must be some other man.
Our Gospel writer tells us that, “he was a righteous man,
yet unwilling to expose her to shame.”
He was a righteous man, a just man,
which in the first-century Jewish context
meant that he obeyed the Law that God had given to Moses,
and the Law that God had given to Moses said,
“If there is a young woman, a virgin who is betrothed,
and a man comes upon her… and lies with her,
you shall bring them both out to the gate of the city
and there stone them to death. . . . Thus shall you purge
the evil from your midst” (Deuteronomy 22:23-24).
Harsh justice, but justice all the same,
intended to make sure that a man’s heirs were indeed his,
which was crucial for the peaceful functioning
of a patriarchal society.
Harsh justice, but justice all the same,
intended to purge from the community the evil of injustice.

But, our Gospel tells us,
while Joseph was a righteous man, a just man,
he was also a merciful man.
Though he would have been within his rights to do so,
he did not want to expose Mary to shame,
which, given the Law, meant to expose her to death.
She was his beloved,
and in his heart mercy called him to go beyond justice
and to let Mary’s life be spared,
merely breaking off the betrothal.
And after the angel appeared to him in his dream
and showed to him how the Spirit of God
was at work in these events,
Joseph’s heart opened to even greater mercy:
casting aside all fear of shame and of transgressing the Law,
he took Mary into his home so that they might live together.

The fourth-century theologian John Chrysostom
saw in Joseph’s small act of human mercy
a hint of the great act of divine mercy that was to come.
He wrote: “It is like the sun not yet arisen, but from afar
more than half the world is already illuminated by its light.
So did Christ, when about to rise from the womb –
even before his birth –
cast light upon the world” (Homily on Matthew, 4.4).
In Joseph’s act of mercy
the grace of God is already showing itself
and we begin to understand what it is
that we will celebrate at Christmas:
mercy that goes beyond what justice requires.

But God’s mercy goes beyond even the mercy shown by Joseph,
as the brightness of the sun outshines the pale light of predawn,
for while Mary was innocent of all sin, we are not.
We human beings have misused our freedom,
and chosen to turn away from God our creator,
and we justly suffer the effects
of a life lived apart from the creative source of life itself:
conflict and violence and, ultimately, unending death.
And God could have justly left us on our own,
exposed to the shame of our own injustice.
But we are God’s beloved,
and in the very heart of God
divine justice is enfolded within divine mercy.
And behold, a virgin conceived and bore a son,
and God came to live with us
and the light that dimly shone in Joseph’s act of human mercy
burst forth in all is blinding brilliance
and purged the darkness of evil from our hearts.

In Advent we still await the coming of that light.
We await the light of mercy that surpasses justice,
and we pray that, like Joseph, our merciful actions also
might be dim reflections of the divine mercy.

Many find this to be a season that tries their mercy.
Think about it: this is the season
when we drag ourselves through crowded malls
to shop for gifts for people
that we don’t really even like very much.
This is the season
when we are forced to spend time with family members
whom we manage successfully to avoid for the rest of the year.
This is the season
when we brood over old hurts and past insults,
generosity unappreciated and favors unreturned,
when we want to hold people accountable; when we want justice.
But the coming of God to live with us is not about justice;
it is about mercy.
The birth of Emmanuel is not about what we deserve
but about the forgiving love that God shows to us,
and which God calls us to show to each other.
This is the season when the dawn of Christ is already appearing.
Come, let us celebrate this feast of mercy
by following the example of Joseph
and letting God’s mercy and forgiveness
fill our hearts and guide our actions.