21 December 2024
Homily
In the first two chapters of his Gospel, Luke presents all the major themes of this Gospel, and already introduces all the important characters, starting with Jesus and John the Baptist, whom he brings together here, already in their mother's womb.
We know how the whole of Luke's Gospel, after these two preliminary chapters, will be built around the theme of Jesus' ascent to Jerusalem. This journey, as well as being a geographical movement, is also a theological theme. Jesus teaches his disciples what his own human pilgrimage will be: a journey to glory through suffering. To someone who expressed a desire to follow him, he said: ‘The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’. According to Luke, Jesus began his life in insecurity, far from his parents' home, in a manger. All this is a symbol of his rejection by the leaders of the people of Israel, who had no place for him in their tradition. The path of Jesus' life in Luke's Gospel begins without a place for him in the inn and ends without a place for him in the hearts of his people. Jesus' response to those who want to follow Him expresses that vulnerability and insecurity are a condition for becoming a “disciple”: total openness to all that obedience to Jesus Christ can mean.
Luke anticipates all this teaching in his first two chapters. The first expression of this is Mary, who is the model of every disciple who listens to the word of God and puts it into practice. Luke's account describes the unexpected way in which, in continuity with the Old Testament, God chose a young Jewish virgin from a tiny village in Galilee. Now Galilee was in a northern province, and was despised by the more cultured Jews of Judea. One of the reasons for this contempt was that the region was inhabited by many Gentiles, so the ritual purity even of the Jews living there was questionable.
Not only does God visit this young girl. It is in her and through her that he visits the rest of humanity. In the Old Testament, in the Second Book of Samuel (2 Sam 6:2-11), we find a colourful description of the transfer of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. The Ark, which is the symbol of God's presence, rests in the house of Obed-Edom and is a source of great blessing for that house. David dances before the Ark. Luke takes up all these elements in the Gospel account we have just read, in his description of Mary's visit to her cousin Elizabeth. Like the Ark, Mary embarks on a journey that takes her from Galilee to Judea through the mountains of Samaria. The same manifestation of joy takes place, including the sacred dance performed by John the Baptist in his mother's womb, corresponding to that of David before the Ark. And Elizabeth's exclamation in greeting Mary almost verbally reproduces David's as he stands before the Ark.
Mary is the true Ark of the Covenant, communicating God's presence to all those she visits. But all this is done with extreme simplicity, and with an admirable touch of humanity. Let us ask her to obtain for us the grace to receive Jesus with joy in our hearts, and, why not, to know how to manifest this joy with the same exuberance as David before the Ark.
Armand Veilleux