HASTY GOD-BEARERS

Reflections on the Fourth Sunday of Advent (Micah 5:1-4a, Hebrews 10:5-10, Luke 1:39-45)

“Mary set out and travelled to the hill country in haste”, reports today’s Gospel. What’s the hurry? She had just received the greatest Good News in human history: “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son” (Luke 1:31). Faced with such a startling news that is going to radically change her own future and the course of history, she had just submitted herself totally declaring, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord” (Luke 1:38). And the very next verse, Mary sets out in haste on this strenuous journey of about 80 kms crossing hills, valleys, and fields to visit her cousin Elizabeth. What’s all the hurry? Why can’t she take some time sit down and think about what just happened? After all, it is not every day that one gets to meet an Angel. It is not too often that we receive a Good News that is not only difficult to digest but life changing.

Shouldn’t she have instead left on a retreat to meditate and marvel at the magnitude and implications of God’s vocation for her life? No, Mary prefers to set off on a trip. Her experience of revelation and her act of surrender provokes an immediate movement. Responding to God’s call means beginning a new journey. We can no more remain stagnant but embrace the dynamism of God’s active accompaniment. When we allow God’s Word to take flesh in us, we feel moved. The infancy narratives of the gospels highlight how the mystery of incarnation sets people on the move. As soon as God's action is felt, everyone involved in the Christmas story begin to set off on a journey that will ultimately lead them to the crib Bethlehem: Mary, Joseph, Zechariah, Elizabeth, the shepherds, angels, Magi, and even the stars.

Mary’s experience of incarnation inspires her to embrace the culture of encounter. The visit of the ‘virgin-Mother’ Mary to the ‘barren-pregnant’ Elizabeth brings about joy, praising, and worship. When Mary greets Elizabeth, the infant in her womb leaps for joy. Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit. She breaks into a prayer of praise that has become part of the Church’s every day prayer, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb”. She declares the first beatitude of the Gospel, “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled”. In this encounter between Mary and Elizabeth, the joy of the coming of the Messiah becomes a concrete, personal and shared experience.

What does Mary bring along for her encounter with Elizabeth which could make this experience possible? She brings Jesus. For Luke, the purpose of Mary’s journey is not merely to give her cousin a helping hand. The visitation is Christological and revelatory of the identity of Jesus. Every biblical verse on Mary, Marian dogma, or apparition reveals something about Christ. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church no964 affirms, “Mary's role in the Church is inseparable from her union with Christ and flows directly from it”. Mary’s journey makes Christ present to Elizabeth and her unborn baby. She becomes the God-bearer (theotokos). She is the new tabernacle. Mary’s visitation helps us realise that through the mystery of incarnation, what belongs to the eternal and invisible realm enters the visible and mortal history.

For Micah (first reading), the identity of the future messiah is of utmost important. He prophesises that God will visit them as a ruler, a shepherd who guides his people, from Bethlehem, the city of David. The second reading emphasises the ‘bodily’ dimension of Christ is emphasised. The ‘corporal’ Christ takes the place of the sacrifices of the Ancient alliance. His body will become the place (lieu), where he accomplishes the Father’s will in concrete history. Mary becomes the God-bearer who mediates these two expectations. In her, the expected Messiah of the prophets becomes ‘flesh’ taking a body that will eventually become the altar of God’s ‘once-and-for-all sacrifice’ of the New alliance.

Christ is the urgent Good News that our world awaits today and Mary inspires us to be hasty God-bearers who can make Christ present to the world. This mission of bearing Christ involves believing in God’s promises, journeying with haste to new places of encounter, following Mary in the footsteps of Christ, carrying the presence of God with us, courageously advancing along the roads of the world to unknown peripheries, entering into the joy of dialogue with our fellow travellers, sharing their search, struggles, joys and sorrows, and joining hands to build a better world. Let our ‘hasty’ God-bearing journeys begin.