I love my mother with my whole heart, but I would be most grateful if she could stop asking me if I am ready for Christmas. Yes, I know that it is December 22nd today, but however many lists we write, somehow there is always more to do. And I am not appreciating the extra anxiety and guilt which my brain is currently contributing to the Christmas story.
This time of the year can be full of intense emotion whichever circumstances we find ourselves in. I’ve already offered anxiety and guilt to the mixing bowl. You might choose to add a good dollop of exhaustion, loneliness, grief and grumpiness.
Which is why it is so lovely to be given a story of pure unadulterated joy to meditate on this morning. A conversation characterised by joy and gladness and rejoicing. Just as the angel predicted to Zechariah in the Temple, ‘even from his mother’s womb’, the baby John is filled with the Holy Spirit and leaps for joy within Elizabeth. Mary’s joy overflows as she sings her hymn of praise to God, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour.’
On one level, this is just two women calling on one another for a catch up and a bit of emotional support. Taken at face value, nothing very much happens in the story. Mary visits and Mary returns. The wife of a priest, Elizabeth, and her young cousin from Nazareth: two pregnant women nattering. It is such an ordinary anecdote that Matthew, Mark and John don’t think it is worth including.
How very wrong they were! The Bible is full of marginal people we should be paying attention to. This is the whole impetus of God. Whenever a character is introduced in the Gospel who normally has no voice we should be on full alert, because you can guarantee that God is about to do something remarkable. Think of the eunuch in the book of Acts, for example.
In today’s Gospel, Luke records the most extraordinary dialogue between these two women. Elizabeth the prophet and Mary the mother of God. When these women speak, we are invited to stop what we are doing and listen in very closely, because they have something very important to say.
If we want to learn more about the Christian faith, it is always good to start with Jesus. And sitting down to read a Gospel from beginning to end will give us all the information we need: his words, his deeds, his conversations with friends and enemies, his betrayal and torture and the astonishing way God overcame the power of death.
What the author ‘Luke’ wants us to consider is the fact that Jesus’ story begins before his arrival on this earth. For Luke, it begins with Mary and the safety of being carried within. And here is the reason we remember Mary on the fourth Sunday of Advent: because the incarnation begins with waiting. Just as we have all be watching and waiting through scripture and song this December, so it is that God waits on Mary as Mary waits.
Her cousin Elizabeth, the ‘vicar’s wife’, has been waiting for many years. Waiting to conceive, without success. Living with the speculation and gossip of friends and family and members of the congregation. I talked earlier about the joy shared between these two women, but ‘Joy’ is also the name of a recent film about IVF and the pain of wanting a child who does not arrive must be honoured here too. Elizabeth’s story reminds us that God blesses us in the waiting, perhaps especially in the waiting which seems without end. The poet Rachel Mann reminds us that Elizabeth’s blessing is offered to everyone who has ever felt afflicted and not good enough.
God is also right in the centre of these two women meeting. As they begin to talk, God brings their individual isolation to an end; and as the ‘back and forth’ of their conversation is recorded, here is a revelation that they are part of something much greater than themselves. This is the Advent message of hope and understanding. Hope that the blessing is always inscribed in the waiting. And an understanding that we are all invited to become the best version of ourselves, the version of ourselves that God knows us to be. The version of ourselves where hope and purpose are part of our everyday, as we begin the project of building God’s Kingdom together: a Kingdom of justice and mercy.
Elizabeth the prophet and Mary the mother of God. Are we listening?
Mary’s song, that beautiful Magnificat which the choristers sing here every day, is the same song which the Liberation Theologians of the 1970’s understood as a radical war cry. They noticed the pattern of reversal in her words: of pulling down and lifting up. The same ‘fall and rise’ which Simeon predicted when he held the baby Jesus in his arms in the Temple. Mary’s God in whom she rejoices, is not the protector and defender of kings and princes, of presidents and dictators but of the marginalised and the overlooked. God’s mighty arm has scattered the proud, brought down the mighty from their thrones and sent the rich away empty. But this same powerful arm has tenderly lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things. At its most basic, perhaps this is why we feel compelled to give to charity at Christmas, particularly to the homeless. Mercy and Justice go hand in hand. When Syria and Lebanon, Israel and Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan are all delivered to our phones and televisions and we give them room to speak to us, our hearts cry out for justice. And it is a cry which God hears and responds to with a question: will you work with me? May I send to you the Prince of Peace? Will you listen to him?
So, in bringing this to a close, I circle back to those intense emotions around Christmas, exacerbated as they often are by commercialism and nostalgia. Both these women have lived overlooked lives, lives which did not conform to the norm, the kind of lives people on social media like to comment on. Which means that if we have arrived in Church feeling out of sorts on this last Sunday of Advent, we might allow ourselves to be welcomed into their joyful conversation and recognise the power of God within it. Mary and Elizabeth are telling us that God is transforming lives in quiet and unexpected places this Advent. Indeed, Mary stayed with her cousin for three months, we are told, presumably to be with her at the birth. Both women are inviting us to see our own lives differently, to recognise the strength of God’s arm to lift us up and to become part of a bigger picture, a greater destiny. Like the tiny infant Mary is carrying, God’s plans for us grow day by day and purposefully, if (like Mary) we are ready to say yes.
