4th Sunday of advent

 IV SUNDAY ADVENT, 20 DECEMBER 2020

LUKE 1. 26-38

Focus: Miracles happen when there is a combination of God’s action and human reception and cooperation

1.      God sends His angel to Mary with His plan of incarnation for salvation. He seeks and awaits her approval. This is precisely the nobility and magnanimity of God: Even though He can do very well without us, yet He wants to involve us, wants us to be His collaborators and sharers. It is only because He loves us. True love values others, respects each person’s dignity and honour.

2.     How much noble and magnanimous we are, being His children? How much we see all others as persons of dignity and respectability? How much we treat others with respect? How often and how easily we despise others, showing a false greatness and sticking to our own ideas, opinions and prejudices?

3.     Then from the part of Mary, what a humility, docility and surrender to God’s grace and plan! What a humility! She does not get puffed up that God Himself is standing at His door for her approval. She does not forget her finitude as a creature before God’s infinity. In all humility, she is aware that the offer of her divine maternity is not her merit or greatness but God’s love and care.

4.     What a docility! She does not contest or argue or reject or doubt God’s plan. Even her question, “how it is possible to bear a son without rapport with her spouse” is a quite normal and legitimate question expected from a simple teenage girl, brought up in faith and morals. Perhaps bearing children outside the marital bond may not be a big issue for many in our modern society. But for her society and tradition, certainly it was a matter of immorality and infidelity. But in her docility, she risked being labelled immoral and unfaithful. For her, what mattered the most was God’s plan and salvation of all, and not her human thinking and reputation.

5.     Then what a surrender: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord! Be it done unto me according to your word!” Often we are so accustomed to these words of Mary that we take for granted and take light the immensity of Mary’s act of acceptance. It needed the guts of the spirit to utter such words of total surrender. What a surrender! She has no discussion, no conditions, no suggestions. She does not clarify how God would safeguard her reputation, or how God would let others know about her virginity and innocence in spite of conception, or how would her family and Joseph take it. She does not request God at least to convince her spouse. She is not much worried about the myriads of uncertainties and risks that await her. Her only concern was to do God’s will and an unconditional ‘Yes’ to God’s will.

6.     Now it is not enough to admire Mary for her humility, docility and surrender. What about our humility, docility and surrender? A little talent, a little capacity, a little money, a little position, how much we become arrogant? Even with regard to spiritual gifts, how easily we succumb to feeling that I am better than others, I am greater than others?

7.     How docile we are? Even though many times God proposes, inspires, advises, admonishes many things, how much we can be obstinate and fixated, clinging to our own ideas and calculations? We give more importance to our human intelligence, reasoning and decisions, rather than God’s wisdom and promptings? Do we know better than God? Can we do better than God?

8.     How often we lack the spirit of surrender? We try to convince God that it is not right and possible to do His will. We have hundred and one reasons to explain and justify why we cannot surrender to God’s ways. We fail to surrender only because I and self-interests become the centre of my whole thinking and not God’s will and the good of others. We may allow ourselves to be carried away by what is false, what is ignominious, what is unjust, what is impure, what is inaffable, what is dishonourable, what is vice and harmful. Instead, as St Paul in his Philippians exhorts us, our focus and striving must be on what is true, noble, just, pure, affable, honourable, virtuous and beneficial. We must put into practice what we have learned, received, heard and seen.

9.     Today let us pray that we may become more and more humble, docile and surrendered like Mary, because only thus, we can receive the Saviour and experience his saving touch.