My mother was one of eight children, in rural Ireland,
and her father died when the eldest child was eleven.
Her mother, my grandmother, must have had her work cut out:
that’s a lot of children to feed, clothe and clean.
The house must have been bedlam,
especially when they were all together in the kitchen.
I am one of six children,
raised is a small three-bedroom semi,
crowded in on one another.
In our small kitchen, as my mother fed us,
occasionally, rarely,
the hubbub of family exchanges,
transmitting news,
expressing needs, opinions, irritations,
would subside into a calm silence.
The silence never lasted long,
and when it broke my mother sometimes said:
‘my mother used to say that was an angel passing’.
I never gave much thought to this until preparing this homily,
which, besides anything else,
shows that the traces of what we say may re-emerge in others many, many years later.
So, a moment of calm in domestic hubbub is diagnosed as an angel passing.
What were my mother and my grandmother getting at?
Angels figure in today’s liturgy:
the opening prayer speaks of
“we,
to whom the Incarnation was revealed by the message of an angel”,
and, in the Gospel,
Joseph changes direction completely
when an angel comes to him in a dream.
Although we are used to seeing angels in paintings
and on Christmas cards,
these are fanciful representations.
Angels do not look like this, and they don’t literally have voices.
They are not part of the material world.
There is a homily by Pope Gregory the Great in which he says:
“the word “angel” denotes a function rather than a nature.
Those holy spirits of heaven ....can only be called angels when they deliver some message.”
Angel means messenger.
Angels are messengers; God’s messengers.
An angel’s message, a word from God,
is grasped deep in a person’s spirit.
That is how angels ‘appear’: in the grasping of the message.
This is hard to depict, or describe, or explain.
Language is inadequate when faced with movements in the depth of the soul.
We see in Joseph a man faced with a very difficult situation.
Appearances suggest Mary has let him down,
and Joseph wants out.
However, before he goes through with his escape,
he grasps that he should trust Mary,
that he should take her as his wife
and that her child should be called Jesus,
because he personifies God’s salvation.
This was God’s message to Joseph, a big message:
and he got it;
in the quiet of the night,
in the depths of Joseph’s soul,
trust displaced his feeling of betrayal.
Returning to the family kitchen,
a moment of spontaneous peaceful quiet in an assembled family
is a moment with the capacity to reach deep down:
God’s messengers may indeed be around.
John the Baptist,
with his mission to straighten us out,
and with his strident words calling us to repentance,
gives way, on this fourth Sunday of Advent,
to the message of an angel:
a message that Jesus is to save us;
a message that Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us.
He enters our world fully human,
dependent on, enclosed by, sustained by Mary’s body.
He can’t get any closer.
In the silence of our hearts,
in the depths of our spirits,
where angels touch us,
we can grasp again that God is with us.
We can wonder afresh at the Good News
that the all-powerful Word of God,
through whom all things came to be,
is heard, as a heartbeat’s whisper, in the womb of Mary.
We can wonder afresh that the all-powerful Word of God
comes to us in this Eucharist.
God is with us.