Word to the Wise
Friday, December 19, 2014 -
[Judges 13:2-7, 24-25a and Luke 1:5-25]"I am Gabriel, who stand before God. I was sent to speak to you and to announce to you this good news. But now you will be speechless and unable to talk until the day these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled at their proper time. " [Luke]
DECEMBER 19
"I am Gabriel, who stand before God. I was sent to speak to you and to announce to you this good news. But now you will be speechless and unable to talk until the day these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled at their proper time. " [Luke]
If the news that Elizabeth would become pregnant in her old age was not enough to make Zechariah speechless enough, his hesitation to believe Gabriel's message took care of it! Samson's mother, in the first scripture today, believed what the angel told her and followed his prenatal instructions! Mary believed what Gabriel told her and accepted her fate and role. Joseph accepted the message he received in a dream. I wonder if Zechariah's situation is meant as a warning to us all!
As the genealogies of Jesus' lineage tell us, there are many surprises in the story of his ancestry and birth. Mary's canticle, the Magnificat, speaks of God "lifting up the lowly," when she visits Elizabeth. It may well be that the evangelists, Matthew and Luke, wanted to emphasize Jesus' humble origins so that the majority of the Christian community, who were poor at the time, might find the kind of solidarity with the lowly that Jesus would show in his later ministry. Certainly the manger scene can underline that for us, although some of the scenes can be pretty fancy nowadays and obscure this important part of the infancy narrative.
Unexpected pregnancies and unexpected characters are part of the Advent message that God's plan of salvation relied on human persons, and human persons don't always meet all expectations that other humans might have. In the case of Jesus, it was God's expectations that would be met. AMEN
config
view
logs
4096.0 KB
99 ms
4
