Dear Parish Family,

The focus of today’s liturgy is the Davidic covenant, the promise of a throne that will last forever. It appears in the First Reading, in the Responsorial Psalm, and in the Gospel, where the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that “the Lord God will give (her son) the throne of David his father.” Jesus is to transform that covenant, revealing “the mystery hidden for many ages.” The throne in this new kingdom is to be occupied by “the Son of the Most High ... the Son of God.” Indeed, he is “Emmanuel,” God-with-us.

We are very close now to the coming of Christ tomorrow. What would the world be like if we were to allow Christ to really come as king? What would a world ruled by Jesus Christ be like? Would we have the poverty and homelessness that we have now? Would we take claim to authority over life and take it away from the most vulnerable ones in their mother’s womb and treat with negligence the elderly? Would Jesus Christ allow the people of his kingdom to kill each other in wars? If only we could join in consenting to God’s rule as Mary did: “Let it be done to me as you say.” Who knows what joy the world would know!
The reign of God begins with our search for a place for Divinity. Where is the proper place for God to abide? Perhaps this was the question that David asked of himself and his adviser Nathan, because the king was disturbed to be living in a cedar palace while God’s ark was confined in a tent. Though Nathan assured David that God was with him no matter where he might go, it was only Nathan’s night-time revelation from God that could make the case: “Why should you build a house for me? I have been with you no matter where you have been. And I will build an even greater house for you.”

What are these readings getting at? What is the mystery—“kept secret for long ages,” Paul writes in Romans—that is now manifested through Jesus? What is the upshot of this talk of God’s temple and dwelling place? The pre-infancy narrative in Luke provides the central clue. It may even suggest a paradoxical answer to our more troublesome issues in our contemporary church.

Mary is told by the angel Gabriel, the messenger of God, that the Lord is with her. Much more intimate than God’s presence to David, the Lord is literally with her. She is the dwelling place. She is the new ark, beyond all our reasonable expectations. She is tent and temple. God is literally, physically in her, conceived as human, her very flesh, great with dignity, by the power of the Most High. And she is the temple. She is the greater house, the promise to David.  “Let it be done to me according to your word.” It is Mary’s very acceptance of the “mystery hidden for ages,” her utter openness to the promise of God’s intimacy with us, that yields her pregnancy. She believed that God could take human flesh in her, become one with her very body. Herein, she was fertile to bear forth the Most High into the world.

This is the heart of the Incarnation mystery: that the ineffable God could take human flesh, could become one with us, could be a human baby. Her “yes,” her “fiat,” is, of course, momentous in the drama of the world, an axial point of history. The willingness of Mary to open her life utterly to God is a model of our humanity as well as of our church and sacraments. The God who became a baby now readily becomes bread on our altar at every Eucharist. We need to be willing Christ-bearers, making ourselves the temple and together with the Church gathering together the ‘Body of Christ.’ We live this mystery of Christmas and bring forth the Savior, just not for ourselves but for the need world we live in. May the Lord’s blessings be with you and your family at this Christmas.

 
Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.