[The first reading from Micah deserves a moment.
We can hear the promise, the hope, in Micah’s words:
He will … feed his flock with the power of the Lord…
They will live secure,….He himself will be peace.
Centuries later,
this promise, and the hopes and expectations that flow from it,
is still very much believed, since,
when the Magi pitch up in Jerusalem in the search of the infant king,
it is some of these verses that the religious experts use
to point them towards Bethlehem –
as we will hear when we get to the Epiphany.
Promise believed.
Turning to the gospel, ]
Mary visits Elizabeth.
Moved by their encounter,
Elizabeth says to Mary:
Blessed is she who believed
that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled
What is that promise?
Its heart is found in the words of Gabriel at the Annunciation
The Holy Spirit will come upon you
and the power of the most high will cover you.
You are to conceive and bear a son.
But that is not the whole of it: who is the child?
Gabriel told Mary, her child would be:
great,
Son of the Most High,
reigning for ever on the throne of David,
holy,
Son of God,
….so no ordinary child.
Indeed, in his life, death and resurrection,
he reveals the true sense of the promise of the Hebrew Scripture,
of which our first reading from Micah was an important example.
Mary believes the promise: she says yes.
Through Mary’s ‘yes’, through her belief in the Lord’s promise,
the world is given more than anyone could ever dare hope for.
The Lord is truly working marvels in Mary.
At the same time – and there is an important lesson for us here –
Mary engages in an ‘ordinary’ act of solidarity and charity.
She goes to support Elizabeth.
Bringing Jesus Christ to the world,
which is our mission as well as Mary’s,
has solidarity and charity as part and parcel of it.
Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews
speaks of the mystery Gabriel announced,
Elizabeth delights in, and we are pondering.
The words of a psalm hold the promise here,
and are heard as the words of Christ.
Christ said, on coming into the world,
Here I am! I am coming to obey your will!
So, Mary’s son is, by his very existence,
and throughout his life,
wholly aligned to will of God.
Then the author of Hebrews explains that will of God:
And this will was for us to be made holy
by the offering of His body made once and for all by Jesus Christ.
The child in Mary’s womb comes
to offer Himself
so that we are made holy.
Being ‘made holy’ is about being of-God, of being God-like.
Familiarity can dull the profundity of this.
The child comes to draw us into the life of God:
not because we deserve it – we don’t –
but out of sheer generosity,
out of overflowing, uncontainable love on God’s part.
God shares in our life that we may share in God’s life.
Join with Elizabeth,
turn to Mary, and acknowledge,
in the poet John Donne’s memorable phrase:
‘Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb’.
‘Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb’...........
No wonder Elizabeth and her unborn child were excited.
Let’s be excited with them.