The Fourth Sunday in Advent

in Macheke. As I was due to leave the parish I had been ministering at and move on to a new mission, I used my retreat to review the four years that I had spent at this parish. I could point to solid structures that I had built that would be my legacy in Mbare: I had turned a rubbish dump into a park, I had built a new kitchen for the Church, a house for the guard and paved a new parking lot. But during my prayer, God said to me, Isaac you’ve been very good about building structures, but what about the people that I entrusted to you, how have you helped me to build them up? And while of course I had not completely abandoned the people God had entrusted to me, I realized that because it was far easier to obtain tangible results by trafficking in bricks and concrete that co-operate and go just where you want them to go, than to traffic in developing communities, where you are dealing with people who are unpredictable, intractable and downright messy at times, and where success is much harder to measure and point to, I had preferred to traffic in buildings rather than in people.

Our readings today juxtapose these exact same two opposite poles of material and human development. On the one hand, in the first reading we have an immensely successful alpha male: King David, who comes to God and tells God what he wants to do for God. “Lord I want to build you a Temple.” On the other hand, our gospel presents us with Mary who responds to the invitation of God with those wonderful words that are the paradigm of spiritual surrender: “Let it be done to me according to your Word.” Thus we have a marvelous juxtaposition of an alpha male who wants to build God a house and a peasant girl from a backwater town in Galilee who lets God build a house in her. David traffics in structures, and God traffics in people. But in order to find people who are willing to cooperate with God, God must go to a place far away from the Temple, far away from the people who have become obsessed with the neatness and order of structures. God must find someone who is prepared to listen, who is not obsessed with what they are doing for God, but who realizes that it’s all about what God is doing for us. “Let it be done to me according to your Word.” In this way, Mary becomes the new Temple. God wishes not to dwell in structures, but to dwell in people.

Our second reading today refers to the mystery that God has been preparing since the beginning of the world. We often think about a mystery as something impossible to understand. However, the word used by Paul here (musterion) was a Greek word that was connected to the Greek mystery religions. These were secret societies, perhaps much like the Free Masons today. They revolved around secret rituals that were designed to give the select members of the religion an understanding of the ultimate purpose of life and creation. Paul chooses to use this word in order to capture both the idea of hiddenness and the idea that what is revealed has to do with the ultimate purpose of life. So the word musterion is being used here by Paul to refer to God’s plan for the salvation of the whole of humanity which has been now revealed in Christ Jesus. In the mystery of the event of Christ Jesus – all is made known – God has held nothing back – we are initiated into full knowledge of salvation. This is essentially what the angel Gabriel makes clear to Mary – the child that she is to carry will be the savior of the world.

But unlike these Greek mystery religions, where the aim was to have a small elite group of enlightened adherents, the aim of the Christian faith is to make manifest what has been hidden for centuries. Paul was one of the first people to realize the full import of what Christ’s life death and resurrection meant for the human race. Paul had a sudden “a-ha” moment where he realized that God’s plan all along had been to use Jesus Christ as the means by which all nations on earth would be saved. The Gospel going out to the Gentiles was not just an afterthought, but had been part of God’s mysterious plan of salvation from the beginning of time. Paul invites us to give glory to God who acts in such a hidden and unexpected way.

It is profitable for us to reflect on this hidden way in which God works within the history of the people of Israel. King David was a great military king and, perhaps more than any other Israelite monarch had in the past or would in the future, David had expanded the borders of the Kingdom of Israel through powerful military conquests. But these borders were not secure and Israel was liable at any minute to get attacked by its many hostile neighbors. There were internal tensions within his own kingdom, not least the rivalry amongst his many sons as they jostled for power and the right to succeed their father as kind. David towards the end of his life turns his attention inward to his kingdom and resolves to do something that would stabilize his kingdom and put it on solid ground. The idea slowly grew within him of building a Temple for the Lord – as the capstone of all that he had achieved. It was in this way that he resolved to consolidate the Kingdom he had ostensibly built for God in order to show to all Israel’s enemies that YHWH was the most powerful deity and the only one worthy of human fealty and praise. It would not be a stretch to say that the Israelites of David’s time imagined God’s plan of salvation as simply building upon the impressive legacy that David has already established.

We know however, that God had other plans. Instead endorsing David’s plans to build him a house, God turns David’s commitment on its head and says to him “Is it for you to build me a house? No, instead, I shall built you a house.” It has to be admitted that God did not fulfil this promise in a spectacularly visible way. The house that he built for David was of course not one of bricks and mortar, but rather a genealogy that would culminate in the birth of Jesus. When we consider the genealogy of Jesus, we will see that God did this in the most unexpected way, given that Jesus’ genealogy includes prostitutes, Gentiles and men of questionable moral stature. God traffics in people, and God often chooses the most unexpected people. If we are looking to collaborate with God, then we had best seek to start processes rather than occupying spaces. If we wish to collaborate with God’s mysterious plans of salvation, we would do well to invest in people, rather than investing in structures and buildings. When we choose the people that we invest in, it is well that we endeavor not to exclude people that the world might dismiss as unimportant and uninfluential.

I think that our religious activity should always be an attempt to make manifest the central mystery of God’s plan for the world. But we must realize how such worship will always be woefully inadequate at capturing this mystery. the best response on our part is to be listeners, like Mary quietly waiting to be taken up into this mystery – and then to respond to it with her words “I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be done to me according to your Word.” By letting God’s Word take flesh in her body, Mary became the new Temple and from this moment, the mystery of God’s plan, instead of being incarnated in a building came to be incarnated in a person. This Christmas God wishes to be born anew in our hearts, if we have the grace to respond to God like Mary.

Questions for reflection

1. Do I gravitate more towards plans and projects that involve concrete deliverables like bricks and mortar rather than hazy people-oriented deliverables?
2. Do I let myself be mesmerized by alpha males like David and thereby fail to recognize the humble handmaids like Mary?