4 ADVENT, YEAR C

Sunday, December 19, 2024

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Micah 5:2-5a

Luke 1:39-55

 

One way Church tradition has described the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament is in terms of promise and fulfillment. The Old Testament records God’s promises of deliverance and salvation; the New Testament records God’s fulfillment of these promises in the coming of Christ.

 

The service of Advent Lessons and Carols is structured to make this point. We listen to a series of lessons and musical responses recording God’s promises to his people of a future anointed one, the Messiah, who will come as judge, king, and savior.

 

This all-too-brief Season of Advent invites us to put ourselves in the place of Israel waiting for the Messiah. In our Anglican tradition, we stubbornly keep this day as the fourth Sunday of Advent, refusing to decorate the Church or sing Christmas carols before the Feast of the Nativity has actually arrived. The idea is that if during Advent we can experience something of Israel’s longing for the promised Savior, then at Christmas our rejoicing at the birth of Christ will be so much more complete and full.

 

In one of today’s Old Testament readings, the prophet Micah, who lived about seven hundred years before Christ, delivers a promise from God addressed to the town of Bethlehem. You, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.

 

To catch the full impact of this prophecy, we need to remember that Bethlehem was where King David had grown up as a shepherd tending the flocks of his father Jesse. In times of national crisis, the people of Israel would look for another king like David to unite them and deliver them from their enemies, just as the original David had done so long ago. So, when Micah spoke of a ruler coming from Bethlehem, his original audience would have understood the promise of another David, another great king who would bring the people to safety as a shepherd gathers his flock.

 

In the concluding reading from the Gospel according to Saint Luke, we see the beginning of this promise’s fulfillment. Pregnant with the Christ child, the Blessed Virgin Mary travels to the hill country of Judah to visit her cousin Elizabeth—who’s also pregnant with the child who’ll become known as John the Baptist. And Elizabeth’s pregnancy is itself the fulfillment of God’s promise to her and her husband Zechariah that they would not remain childless in their old age.

 

But when Mary arrives, Elizabeth recognizes the fulfillment of a far greater promise. Filled with the Holy Spirit, she cries out: Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.”

 

Then Elizabeth concludes: “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” These words have at least three layers of meaning. At the first and most obvious level, Elizabeth is honoring Mary for accepting the angel’s message that even as a virgin she would conceive and become the mother of the Messiah.

 

The second layer of meaning has a wider scope. Elizabeth is honoring Mary as the representative of faithful Israel awaiting the fulfillment of God’s promises. Mary understands her pregnancy in precisely these terms, as becomes clear in the song of praise we know as the Magnificat, sung in response to Elizabeth’s words: “He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his posterity for ever.”

 

The third layer of meaning has the widest scope of all. Mary represents all people everywhere who faithfully believe that God will fulfill his promises to them. So Elizabeth’s words apply to us as well: Blessed are we who believe that there will be a fulfillment of what has been spoken to us by the Lord.

 

Think for a moment about the place of promise and fulfillment in our own lives. When we’re young, we naturally look to the future as a time of promise. One of the joys of being around little children is the opportunity to experience the approach of Christmas through their eyes. For children, this season is a time of enormous excitement and anticipation, which builds and builds until the final moment of fulfillment on Christmas morning.

 

As we grow up, we look forward to the various transitions and rites of passage in our lives as moments of promise, moments that we believe will bring about the fulfillment of all our hopes and dreams: graduating from school; finding the right job; perhaps for some, getting married and having children; perhaps for others, achieving some personal or professional milestone, such as getting published or receiving some honor or recognition in one’s field; and finally, in due course, retiring in the hope of doing all the things we didn’t have time for when we were working.

 

As we reach all these milestones, however, we find that sometimes the promise they held out for us is fulfilled, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes we get everything we hoped for; sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we achieve our goals only to find that they don’t bring us the sense of fulfillment we thought they would. Deep in our hearts, there always remains an inexplicable longing for something more—some deeper fulfillment, some greater joy—that we can’t quite put our finger on and that we don’t quite know how to name.

 

As St. Augustine puts it, God has created us for himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. All our hopes and desires will never be completely satisfied until we see God face to face and abide for eternity in his presence. But that’s God’s promise to us as well: that the longing for eternal life and perfect joy that he’s implanted in our hearts won’t be in vain.

 

The birth of the Christ child in Bethlehem is God’s pledge to us that he can and will fulfill even this promise. Jesus comes to save us, to take away our sins, and to raise us to new life. As we prepare to greet him this Christmas, we place our hope in him as the one in whom all God’s promises find their true and final fulfillment.