Today’s readings: 2 Samuel 7,1-5. 8-11.16; Romans 16,25-27; Luke 1,26-38.
“Let what you have said be done to me” are not the easiest words we find to say in most of the circumstances that come across in daily life. Yet in the gospel they are the magic words Mary utters and that open the door for a radically new presence of the Lord in history. God needed his own creation to continue to manifest Himself fully to humanity.
What is special about Luke’s gospel account today is precisely this ‘disturbance’ that comes from above, a sort of interference that makes Mary and us think out of the box of ordinary life. God continues to call incessantly, and His interferences provoke, shake, surprise and even disturb what we may consider our spiritual and religious peace.
Authentic faith in God can never settle down in religious stereotypes, it can never find expression in clichés, it can never be tamed in religious routine. This is what King David was projecting in his mind when out of awe towards the divine he wanted to build a temple for the Lord to dwell in. God’s ways are different.
The way Mary’s and Elizabeth’s lives took a sudden turn is indicative of God’s ways in our lives. God gives signs which vary drastically from time to time, from person to person. Those signs are inner promptings and stimuli that call for a response on our part. Signs that are divine, transcendent, and are meant to bring to our attention what otherwise we could easily ignore in our deepest spaces of existence.
Mary’s “Here I am” is a statement of presence of mind and heart. So many callings come across in life and we are not all there. Mary’s presence of mind and heart is recurring throughout the Scriptures in all those whose humanity, like Mary’s, served for God’s mystery to unfold in human language. God knows best and His callings only enhance authenticity in us.
This Christmas in particular should recall in us the need in our times for intelligent listening to God’s word. Intelligent listening makes us not just capable to do more and better, but increase the capacity in the heart and mind to contain the divine in us. Our religion is very often still focussing too much on the temple as God’s dwelling, just as David thought and projected.
But from such an early stage, God through Natan revolutionises all this and shifts the focus of religion from the temple to the heart; a promise which we see then realised in Mary in the New Testament. She becomes the Shekinah par excellence, the sacred space where God’s transcendence dwells.
Shekinah is Hebrew for dwelling and denotes the Tabernacle for the Jews. The prophets of old very often refer to new ways of the unfolding of God’s presence in time, extending from the Holy of Holies to the abiding presence of the divine co-extensive to the body and life of each and everyone who, like Mary, let go in adoration of God’s word.
In times when the institutions of religion, the family, the school and even our parishes are in crisis, God’s salvation is no longer naturally transmitted institutionally. The times we live in today call for a more personalised transmission from generation to generation. This is our crisis today whenever we speak of evangelisation. The institutions, once strong channels of faith and religion, have now lost much of their strength.
But God, like He did with David and in Mary, continues to be creative, reversing the way we have always believed it should be, and instead making His transcendence as if outpouring from humanity itself. St Paul in his letter to Romans, speaks of “the revelation of a mystery kept secret for endless ages”. God’s secret unfolds in time, it is an event that takes flesh in humans created in His own image and likeness.
It is in our humanness that God opens His secret, and it is in the poor space of our personal interiority that He continues to manifest his self as God. It is through this obedience of faith that we can have an inkling of infinity, that our humanity is completed, that our humanity is reconciled with the divine.