We’ve reached the Fourth Sunday of Advent. And so, we still have a few days of waiting left before the season of Christmas begins. Hence, it becomes urgent amid our busy preparations to take some time to reflect on the great mystery of our salvation.
One way to do this is to spend some quiet time contemplating your Nativity set. At the beginning of Advent this year, Pope Francis gave the Church a very nice gift. He issued an Apostolic Letter on the importance of Nativity sets.1 The Nativity scene arouses wonder, the Holy Father insists,
because it shows God’s tender love: the Creator of the universe lowered himself to take up our littleness. The gift of life, in all its mystery, becomes all the more wondrous as we realize that the Son of Mary is the source and sustenance of all life. In Jesus, the Father has given us a brother who comes to seek us out whenever we are confused or lost, a loyal friend ever at our side. He gave us his Son who forgives us and frees us from our sins2It's easy to overlook the ordinary way in which the extraordinary conception of the Son of God came about. In today’s Gospel, we hear about Saint Joseph, who is identified as a righteous, or just, man. Betrothed to the young woman, Miriam, he learns the troubling news that she is pregnant. Since he has not yet taken her into his home, Joseph knows the child is not his. The inspired author of Matthew does not reveal how Joseph learned that Mary was pregnant. Did she tell him? Did someone else tell him? Did he learn it through the rumor mill of small-town Nazareth? No matter how he learned it, it’s easy to imagine his distress.
Wise to the ways of the world, Joseph ponders how he might extricate himself from what was no doubt a humiliating, if perhaps heartbreaking, situation. Being righteous, his desire to do the right thing is tempered by mercy. All that is truly just is tempered by mercy. Justice without mercy is revenge.
Specifically, Joseph is concerned that the penalty under the Law- death by stoning- not be imposed on the young pregnant woman. It is important, I think, to note that the angel appears to Joseph and explains the situation to him, urging him, “do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home,” only after he determined his course of action.3 In other words, the angel did not come down immediately after Joseph learned the embarrassing news that his intended wife was pregnant and explain everything to him, thus instructing him what to do. No, he had to wrestle with the conundrum, examine his conscience and his heart, and determine his course of action first.
It is also important to point out that, even while seemingly well-discerned, what Joseph intended to do on his own was not the right thing. The right thing was to take Mary as his wife, as indicated by the angel. I wonder, would the right answer have been different if the circumstances of his intended wife’s pregnancy had been ordinary?
As Christians, we must not fail to realize that not only is justice tempered by mercy, but in Christ mercy triumphs over judgment. Do not our uniquely Christian Scriptures teach- “For the judgment is merciless to one who has not shown mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment”?4
At the heart of the wonder provoked by contemplating Nativity scenes is the grace and mercy the Father gives us through his Son by the power of their Spirit. The Father did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it from sin and death.5
In considering the ordinariness of the Lord’s birth, the late theologian, Herbert McCabe, commenting in a Christmas homily on Jesus’s genealogy as outlined in Matthew, noted that the moral of this genealogy “is too obvious to labour.”6 What is too obvious is that Jesus does not belong to the nice clean world of so much popular imagination. He does not even belong “to the honest, reasonable, sincere world of the [New York Times] or [The Salt Lake Tribune].”7
Jesus “belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars.”8 In short, he belongs to us. Because he belongs to us he can save us, which he does by loving us, being merciful and compassionate towards us, taking pity on us. In so doing, he hopes we, in turn, will be merciful, compassionate, and have pity for each other until at last we attain the fullness of his stature.9
With regard to responding in kind to Christ’s love, McCabe noted, “if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.”10 This is very much in tune with our Collect, or opening prayer for Mass on this Fourth Sunday of Advent. In this prayer, we implored the Father that by Jesus’s “Passion and Cross” we “be brought to the glory of his Resurrection.”11 This belongs to the prayer we are encouraged to say three-times daily: the Angelus.
Indeed, the wood of the manger becomes the wood of the cross. But do not be afraid. By his cross and resurrection, Love, who comes to us as an impoverished child, has conquered death. Alleluia!
1 Pope Francis, Apostolic Letter Admirabile Signum [On the Meaning and Importance of the Nativity Scene].↩
2 Ibid., sec. 3.↩
3 Matthew 1:20.↩
4 James 2:13.↩
5 John 3:17.↩
6 Herbert McCabe. OP, God Matters, 249.↩
7 Ibid.↩
8 Ibid.↩
9 Ephesians 4:13.↩
10 From Terry Eagleton’s “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching.”↩
11 Roman Missal, “Fourth Sunday of Advent.”↩
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