4th Sunday of Advent 2024
Micah 5:2-5; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45
What is Our Lady doing when she goes to visit Elizabeth? Perhaps she is withdrawing from her own neighbourhood for a time while she adjusts to her pregnancy. Certainly, she is going to support and help her elderly relative as the latter comes to terms with her own pregnancy at a late stage in her life. We recall that Mary is always the model of the Church, the eschatological ikon, the exemplar of what the Church should be doing, so we ask what lesson she is here presenting to us.
Is there anybody to whom you or I should be bringing help and support, particularly at this time of year? Do you have a relative, a friend, a neighbour, who may be struggling with loneliness, bereavement, illness, anxiety, and who would benefit from a visit, a phone call, an email? Sometimes, visits can be a burden, rather than a help, for the person visited: we need to be discreet, to consider the old question cui bono? (who benefits?) whose needs are being met? Are we visiting for the other person’s benefit, or for our own? Could their needs be met better by a message than by a personal visit? Make sure that concern for the other is the driving force.
What else does Our Lady do? She greets Elizabeth, presumably with a cheerful shout through the doorway: “Ey up, Aunty Betty!” Our demeanour is important. Are we bringing joy, or misery? Will our visit be a benefit, or a burden?
Mary also brings Christ, the Saviour, to her relative and to Elizabeth’s unborn child. John the Baptist leaps in his mother’s womb, recognising, while yet unborn, the presence of the unborn Jesus. Do you or I bring Christ to others, not by preachiness but by being a presence of Christ? Jesus Himself promised that, if anybody loves Him, He and the Father will make their home in that person. So, if we are doing our best to love Jesus, then He will be living in us, and we should radiate His presence, not consciously, but simply by being ourselves. The question which each of us needs to ask ourselves is “Am I a presence of Christ for others?”
The Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, has also been poured into us, and so we should bring the Holy Spirit to those whom we encounter. Above all others, Our Lady is filled with the Holy Spirit who preserved her from sin, and who overshadowed her in the Incarnation. Hence, whilst the baby leaps in his mother’s womb, Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit, conveyed to her by Mary, and is able to prophesy. We are not likely to endow others with the gift of prophecy, but if we are indeed bearers of the Holy Spirit, then that same Spirit will be conveyed to those whom we meet.
Elizabeth’s prophecy relates both to Mary and to the unborn Jesus. She pronounces both of them to be blessed, applying the same word to each. Consequently, it should be unthinkable for anyone who claims to be Christian to withhold honour from Mary who is described, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, by the same term as is applied to her Divine Son. Hence, she is indeed Our Blessed Lady, and is rightly called such.
“The Mother of my Lord” is the other term applied by Eliabeth, who expresses wonderment that such a person should come to her. Again, there is a clear message that Mary is someone whom we should view with reverence, and the reason for her blessedness is described: “Blessed is she who believed” states Elizabeth.
It is Mary’s faith which is the source of her blessedness: it is a spiritual motherhood which precedes and makes possible her physical motherhood. In this, Elizabeth anticipates Jesus Himself, who was to declare “Blessed rather those who hear the word of God and keep it”. No one heard and kept the word of God so completely as did His Mother, and for this reason she is blessed beyond all others.
Once more, we are left in no doubt that we must honour the Mother of the Lord, and again it is Our Lady who shows the way for the Church. “Anyone who does the will of my Father is my brother and sister and MOTHER” Jesus was to declare. To the extent that we do the Father’s will, we are mothers of the Son, bringing Him to birth in our world today, and by our faith sharing in the blessedness of her whom all generations are to call blessed.
