Homily for 4th Sunday of Advent

Homily for the
4th Sunday of Advent

Dec. 19, 2021
Heb 10: 5-10
St. Joseph Church, New Rochelle, N.Y.

“Behold, I come to do your will, O God” (Heb 10: 7).

Nativity Window

OL of the Valley Church, Orange, N.J.

The whole Christian world is excitedly preparing for Christmas, our annual memorial and celebration of the birth of our Savior in insignificant little Bethlehem, “too small to be among the clans of Judah” (Mic 5:1).  It’s such a joy-filled time that not even the stiff, sour Puritans of 17th-century England and New England could suppress it.  (They tried to outlaw Christmas, you know.)

But our festival is not without a quiet note, a somber note, a note with something like foreboding.  The “one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old” (Mic 5:1) comes to save us, and he comes to save us by doing God’s will.

The Letter to the Hebrews explains:  “By this ‘will,’ we have been consecrated thru the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:10).  Jesus was born in Bethlehem in order to offer himself up for us sinners, offer himself as a sacrifice on the altar of the cross, and by offering himself to take away our sins and consecrate us to God.  His obedience to his Father counteracted Adam’s disobedience and made things right again between humanity and God.    

This doesn’t mean that God the Father willed his Son’s death.  It does mean that the Father willed his Son to invite all men and women, sinners and saints alike, Jew and Gentile alike, to forgiveness and redemption, to consecration in an intimate relationship with the Father.  Such an inclusive invitation had a price for Jesus.  Not everyone welcomes God’s generosity.  They didn’t in 1st-century Israel, just as today we see people who wish to exclude others who are different from themselves.  So Jesus’ self-offering led to the cross; so he offered his body “once for all,” for all of humanity.

Did Jesus have to do his Father’s will?  No, he didn’t.  We celebrate at Christmas that he was born a flesh-and-blood human being, born the son of the Virgin Mary.  “I come to do your will, O God”—but to do the Father’s will by a deliberate choice.  Remember that he was tempted by Satan in the wilderness and could have chosen the way of power, pride, and sensuality instead of the way of faithfulness.  Remember that in Gethsemane he prayed to his Father to take away the cup of suffering that was close at hand.  He could have run away.  He could have backed down from preaching what God wanted of him.

Even before he was born, Elizabeth, his mother’s relative, recognized that he was “blessed” (Luke 1:42)—blessed in anticipation of what he would do in obedience to his Father.

At every Mass we pray the Lord’s Prayer, and you probably pray it often during the week.  It’s called the Lord’s Prayer because our Lord Jesus taught it to us.  In it, like Jesus we pray that God’s will be done.  “I come to do your will, O God.”  When we submit ourselves to God’s will, we act like Jesus.  Acting like the Son of God, we become children of God.

So acting, we also act like the Mother of Jesus.  Before she visited her cousin Elizabeth, she accepted God’s plan for her when she told the archangel Gabriel, “Let it be done to me as you say” (Luke 1:38).  Because of her obedience to God’s will, Elizabeth recognizes her as “blessed among women,” blessed because she believed what was spoken to her and accepted it (1:42,45).

Accepting God’s will—“thy will be done”—in our own lives is what brings the blessing of God upon us.  It’s what enables the grace of our Lord Jesus to consecrate us, to make us sacred or holy before God.

If it wasn’t easy for Jesus always to do his Father’s will, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy for Mary either—as a frightened teenager or as a mature woman standing under her Son’s cross—just as surely it’s not easy for us always to do the Father’s will in our lives, to accept what he asks of us—in the way of carrying out our personal responsibilities, in the way of suffering, in the way of resisting our own temptations to sensuality, pride, and power.  Living obediently, living faithfully, is the “sacrifice and offering” (Heb 10:5) that God desires of us, as he desired it of his own Son in the flesh.  Following Jesus Christ in our own lives is what gives meaning to Christmas; it’s what will “pour forth” divine “grace into our hearts” so that “we may be brought to the glory of his resurrection” (Collect).