Sunday 4 Advent (B): Getting real with God

Lk 1:26-38

When I am preparing my Sunday homily, a question I always ask myself is, “what do God’s good, ordinary people want to hear?” Fast on top of that, I ask myself, “what do His people need to hear?”

I cast my mind over, as best I can, the faces and names of those likely to turn up at Mass. I try to imagine something of the lives they lead, their joys and sorrows. I try to identify what I might say to help them, to console them, to encourage them, to challenge them, to give them hope and the resolve to work for that hope.

While all of that is both good and necessary, it is not, however, enough. Indeed, it could be dangerous for those very same people, if I, as a servant and minister of the Gospel, seek to use the Word of God simply to cater to their wants or needs.

And here is the great struggle for the preacher, at least for this preacher. Before anything else, I am a priest who must proclaim the Word of God according to God’s wants and God’s “needs.”

On the one hand, I long so greatly to speak words of peace, of healing and of comfort to you. But on the other, I can only do that if that is what the Word of God itself wants for you. Otherwise, I seek to please human beings and not the God who created and redeemed them.

To put it another way, although I must be as aware as I can of the actual human reality of all of those the Lord has brought to hear me preach, I must be more aware still of the reality of God.

While I cannot ever deny the complexity and mixture of joy and sorrow, of hope and despair, of grace and sin, of loneliness and longing in those who hear me, woe to me if I consider all of that as more real than the living presence of God here among us.

Indeed, woe to you if I ignore one iota of God’s Word and of its pressing demands so as to speak pleasing, human words to your ears.

Why do I say “woe to you”?

Because human reality, no matter how real it may seem to each of us in the here and now, is but an illusion if it is not open to, welcoming of and obedient to the reality of God. In other words, the preacher has the unenviable task of making people more and more real.

The Word of God that created the real you at the moment of conception, seeks to make that reality blossom to its fullest by strengthening and invigorating it day by day through that same Word, proclaimed to you in the Gospel and explained to you by the all too humble ministry of priests.

I say all of this because I believe it is one of the jewels hidden in the Gospel of the Annunciation, a Gospel which has particular meaning for this parish community of “the Annunciation.”

Many might consider the Annunciation story as no more than a beautiful legend or myth. It seems so unreal, far-fetched almost. It would be laughed at by many who consider themselves sophisticated and down to earth.

But, on our side, as believers, we appeal to faith. What does faith do for us? It gives us certainty about realities we cannot yet see. We must hear the Annunciation with faith, that is, with the acceptance of realities far more real than our own supposed reality, realities attested to, not by mere human experience, but by the Word of God himself.

The Annunciation is the explosion of those realities into the mundane reality of one human existence, that of a young girl in an obscure town betrothed to some man called Joseph. In her simplicity of life, Mary surely had some little plan for herself, a plan which coincided to some degree with Joseph’s. This was their reality, without grandeur and without spectacle.

But it is precisely into such ordinary reality that the reality of God seeks entrance. God’s reality, you see, is not beyond the exterior limits of the universe. It is here – and now. God’s reality interfaces with our reality in all its uncertainties and anxieties.

The veil of mortality, like a thick fog, prevents us from seeing the present reality of God. To help us, God gives us faith to see through the fog, beyond the veil of death. Faith is the trust shown by a blind man who hearkens to the voice of one who loves him and tells him what to do, where to step, where to turn. If there were no death there would be no need for faith, for we would see face to face. Faith not only faces death but sees beyond it and renders it powerless. Thus the words of Jesus, “he who believes in me will never die.”

Those who actively refuse (I do not mean the so-called “anonymous Christian) to believe must necessarily see death as their final end. This is a terrible way to live, a way of living which denies even the reality of their life before death. For if death be the end, what is life but a frustrating search for meaning, a meaning which finds its consummation in nothingness?

For the believer, however, the question is not whether or not there is a God, or whether or not He is here. The question is whether I will accept him as being here, not passively, like a spy watching my every move, but actively, in an engaged and lovingly engaging rapport.

Will I, in other words, let God be real in my reality? Will I allow him not only to be the description of words in a holy book, an artistic representation in painting or in music, an inspiring idea and moral example, but actually to be fully alive here and now with me and involved in my life?

To all these questions, Mary answered “yes.” Mary allowed her own reality to become part of God’s reality and, in doing so, she herself, the full of grace, became the fullest woman and the fullest human person who ever existed.

Some might object that she had an angelic messenger to help her. Yes, but many others in the bible had angelic visions and then sinned.

You might insist that she was full of grace, so it was easier for her. Yes, she was and is full of grace, but grace does not take away our freedom: it makes it more free still, and that means that she had to face more than any other human person the temptations that come with freedom.

But let me tell you a secret.

You and I, we have something more than an angelic messenger: we have the Gospel itself, not from the lips of an angel, but from the lips of the Son of God and from the apostles and martyrs whose lives were consumed by the reality of his love.

As for fullness of grace, what was our baptism if not the eradication of sin from our souls and the fullness of sanctifying grace?

And, to shock you even further, what is the sacrament of confession if not fullness of grace on demand?!

Not only that! Mary received the mortal flesh and blood of Jesus in her womb. We receive the immortal body and blood of Jesus in our very souls.

So those objections are really not objections at all. The question returns, then: will I, as did Mary, accept that my present reality, with all its ups and downs, is nothing other than the place in which the Lord seeks to draw me into his reality?  Will I stop demeaning my own dignity by considering myself some sort of cast off and, instead, rejoice with the Magnificat of Mary because “God has looked upon my lowliness”?

In this sense, the Annunciation was not one event in the life of one woman. The Annunciation takes place in the life of everyone who has the humility and the hope to accept that it is into their life that the Son of God wishes again to explode with the reality of all realities, which is his divine life and his divine love. The Magnificat is not a solo, but a chorus for a full four-voice choir – the choir of the human race.

Do not then ask what the Word of God and its humble preacher can do for you, but pray with deep and sincere trust that every aspect of your own reality might be a place in which the loving tenderness of the Word of God may manifest himself to you, in you and through you.

Learn to say and to pray and to sing unceasingly, “fiat, fiat”, “let it be done to me according to your Word ... Magnificat anima mea Dominum!”

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, December 18^th, 2005, Annunciation Parish, DC: 8.30 am