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Today is Monday, the fourth week of Advent. There are only five days left, of bated breath, before we hear the angels sing and step into the dim light of the stable in Bethlehem to witness once again the most amazing/awesome happening in the history of humanity.
The readings of the church’s liturgy accompany us as we approach the mystery of the Incarnation. They focus our minds and our hearts as “we seek the face of God.” Isaiah reminds us that we are seeking the face of the “God of Surprises.” Achaz, his heart set on regional alliances, just does not want to risk being surprised by God. So he offers a “pious” excuse. But God is determined to surprise humanity. His unexpected initiative makes the impossible possible. “A virgin will conceive and bear a son.” That child will be “God with us”… the God who is part of who we are and everything we think, do and say … a God who is always there for his people, right in the middle of their lives.
That tiny, vulnerable child is incredibly the “King of Glory,” who reverses all our categories, breaks all our rules, and overturns our ways of thinking. That child identifies with all the “little ones” of our world. Mary of Nazareth, the virgin mother of that child, was one of those little ones, four times marginalized – because she was a woman, because she was poor, because she was young, and because she was a Galilean. But she is the one who agrees to be surprised by the irruption and action of God in her life. Her “yes” opens the door of history to the person of Jesus Christ … to God who acts in and through littleness. God’s loving intervention often happens in a place of poverty and marginalization. God delights in the oppressed and the excluded of our world. We find the face of God in them and in the forgotten, in those whom the “world” despises. They are the ones where “God with us” is to be found; among whom God brings about everyday his Christmas mystery of Incarnation and births us to new life in Christ.
- Sr. Margaret Scott, aci, is the director of the St. Rapaela Center (Haverford, PA) and the author of “The Eucharist and Social Justice” (Paulist Press).
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