Reflection for the Fourth Sunday of Advent C 

Readings: Micah 5: 1-4a (RM) or 2-5a (RCL); Psalm 80; Hebrews 10: 5-10;Luke 1: 39-45 (RM), or 39-45 or 46-55 (RCL).

We’re poised now, teetering, between Advent and Christmas.

Poised between anticipation and realization.

Posed between the past and the future, much as Elizabeth and Mary were poised, between the faith of their ancestors, and what would become the Christian faith.

Elizabeth and Mary, both pregnant with the future.

Folks with long memories might remember when a “baby bump” was not a thing to be remarked or even noticed in polite society. Married women who taught school might be required to leave their teaching job before the bump showed. Opponents of the ordination of women in Protestant or Anglican churches were horrified at what they considered the obscenity of a visibly pregnant priest at the altar. It was as if some deep shame was attached to obvious pregnancy.

Our Gospel reading this Sunday rips off the veil of shame and celebrates new life in the womb, not only that of the two babies but a life-giving cosmic wonder.

The story as we have it is paradigmatic and not historical in nature. The Lukan writer developed a literary composition with a journey motif to prove a point about the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. As in the Nativity story, too many aspects either don’t fit what we know historically, or don’t make sense. The first line of our First Reading from the book of Micah shows what Luke’s intent may have been in locating Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem at the birth:

“From you, Bethlehem-Ephratha, too small to be among the clans of Judah, will come one who is to rule Israel, one whose origin is from of old, from ancient times.”

Luke displaces Joseph and Mary (why would she be forced to make an arduous journey while near term?) from Nazareth to Bethlehem, so as to fulfill the prophecy about the origins of the One who would bring peace.

In this story, as New Testament scholar Robert J. Karris OFM points out, it “strains credulity to imagine a fourteen-year-old Jewish virgin making a four day journey by herself.” Never mind if she were in what used to be known as a “delicate condition,” never mind that she travelled “with haste.”

For years I thought that Mary came to help out her older relative with an undoubtedly difficult first birth. Silly me. That’s not what Luke wrote. He has Mary returning home prior to the birth of John. Would real women do that?

What this departure does in the story arc is to get Mary off the scene in order to clearly separate the characters at each birth: Elizabeth, Zechariah and John, then Mary, Joseph and Jesus. Luke’s intent was both literal and theological: he brings the two mothers together for a time, and shows each of them fully aware, speaking from the power of the Spirit. The mothers’ inspired insight sets up the relation between John and Jesus that was to prove salvific: the precursor who clears the way for the One who will bring peace, each of them liberators, each of them holy.

It can feel tremendously rewarding to see two important women on centre stage, pregnant women at that. Not only would they each give birth to the key figures, but in this story they name the Mystery. They speak and act from the Spirit.

In the words of Carmelite monastic Teresa M. Boersig, OCD:

“Our first home was in the womb of our earthly mother, but the womb of God is our ‘forever’ home… Living in God’s womb is living in the heart of the Trinity…. In the womb of God, our Eternal Mother, we can indeed enter and find again the source of our being, the font of life-giving waters, the life of our life. …It is our refuge, our place of repose, our home.”*

Let us tread lightly on this holy bridge linking Advent and Christmas.

© Susan K. Roll

*From The People’s Companion to the Breviary vol I, © 1997, by the Carmelites of Indianapolis.

Revised from the Reflection of December 19, 2021.