We’re now in the final few days before Christmas, and this Sunday’s readings are given to us by the Church to be our final preparation for Christmas. And, as every year, the Church aids our final focus by turning us towards Our Lady. The Blessed Virgin was the one who first welcomed the baby Jesus into her heart and into her womb, and if we turn to her she can help us do the same for us this Christmas.
There are a great many things things we can learn by imitating Our Lady, a great many things we can gain by turning to her powerful and motherly intercession on our behalf. But this year let me point to just one, one thing that we too can do, can imitate, to prepare for Christmas.
And that thing is believing what God has promised. Because He has promised a great many things, including things that hold for us especially at Christmas.
There are two obvious things we can see in today's readings, two ways she trusted in God’s promises. The most obvious is the manner in which she responded to what the Archangel Gabriel asked of her. She said yes. She trusted that this highly unusual thing that the angel was saying would come true. She had just been told that she was to conceive by the power of the Holy Spirit. This had never happened before in human history, and never since. And yet, she trusted what God said through the angel.
And when she proceeded to go visit her cousin Elizabeth (which we didn't hear read today), Elizabeth praised her for this very thing: for trusting what God had promised her, “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord”(Lk 2:45).
And we too need to trust what God has promised for us.
The second, less obvious, thing she trusted in was a promise of God from of OLD. The message from the Archangel Gabriel referred to a much older promise, a promise not made to Our Lady but to King David, a thousand years beforehand. We heard that promise re-read to us today as our first reading, in which God told King David that He would raise up a “House” for him(2 Sam 7:13), meaning that his descendants as a line of kings would continue, and that a great king would arise. Our Lady, as a faithful trusting Jew, trusted and hoped in this promise. She knew that the Scriptures showed countless occasions when the Lord kept His promises, and she expected Him to keep this one too. And so when the angel said that she was to have a child who would be this descendent of David, a new definitive king to fulfil the ancient promise that there would be a king,
when she heard this promise to her personally it made sense to her in the light this ancient promise of old.
Where does this leave us, today? We too have promises that were made of old in the Scriptures.
We can choose to ignore those promises, maybe ignore them because they are old and to people in a far away land.
Or, we can choose to listen to those promises, just as Our Lady trusted in promises that were old and ancient and made a thousand years before her.
And what promises are those, for us, at Christmas?
Let me note just two:.
1) The promise that His “grace is sufficient for you”(2 Cor 12:9), as He was sufficient for St Paul in His trials, and His grace is sufficient even to sustain me amidst the busy hectic pace of Christmas.
2) The promise that He still comes to the lowly and humble of heart (c.f. Lk 2:50), as Our Lady joyfully proclaimed in her ‘Magnificat’. If I am lowly and humble, if I put other people before myself at Christmas, think of their needs and preferences before my own, then the Lord will come to me at Christmas.
So to sum up.
Our Lady trusted in God’s ancient promises in the Scripture, and so was ready to hear and trust the message from the angel, and her faith was rewarded by God coming to her.
If we trust in those many promises of old, if we are trust in His strength, if we are humble and lowly before others in their preferences, then He will reward and come to us this holy season too.
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