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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
As you may know, Advent is a season of preparing for the Christ: He Who came once in human flesh to die on the cross for our sins; He Who comes to us now in Word and Sacrament to forgive our sins; and He Who will come a final time in glory to judge the living and the dead. This Advent as we continue such preparation, we continue to ask the question “Whose Son is the Christ?” The two previous weeks we have considered the Christ’s Divinely‑inspired genealogies, recorded in St. Luke’s and St. Matthew’s Gospel accounts, which in part have given us the answers “Son of God” and “Son of Man”—“Man” understood at least to some extent as “humanity”, for tonight, as if elaborating on “Son of Man”, the question “Whose Son is the Christ?” is answered not with a “man” but with a “woman”, namely, with the “Son of Mary”.
The Holy Scripture that we heard tonight not surprisingly supports the answer “Son of Mary”. Tonight’s Additional Psalm refers to God’s covenant with David, of whose line was Joseph, if not also Mary herself. Tonight’s First Reading (also the Gospel Reading for this coming Sunday, the Fourth Sunday in Advent) reports the angel Gabriel’s announcing Jesus’s birth to Mary. And, tonight’s Second Reading gives an account of Jesus’s being the Son of Mary’s contributing to people in Nazareth’s rejecting Him (confer and compare Matthew 13:53‑58 and Luke 4:16-30). Of course, instead of or in addition to those passages, we could have heard other passages. For example, Genesis 3 reports God’s promise that the “Seed” or “Offspring” of the woman would “bruise” or “crush” the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15). Isaiah 7 foretells that the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son (Isaiah 7:14), and Matthew 1 reports that prophecy’s fulfillment in Mary’s conceiving and bearing Jesus (Matthew 1:18-23). And, Galatians 4 speaks of, when the fullness of time had come, God’s sending forth His Son born of a woman (Galatians 4:4).
Holy Scripture made the prophecy and reported it as fulfilled, but that does not mean either that everyone then understood and accepted or that everyone today understands and accepts that the Son of Mary is the Christ. As we heard in the Second Reading, many in Jesus’s hometown who heard Him took offense at Him because they could not deal with the fact that the carpenter, the Son of Mary, the one whose family—of whatever relationship—they knew, could have such wisdom and by His own hands do such mighty works. They had a sort of blindness toward Him (Schweizer, TDNT 8:363), arguably at least analogous to the blindness we all have when it comes to spiritual matters. The ordinariness of Jesus’s life and ministry may not meet our expectations, or we may take offense at Him for some other reason and so fall into sin or from faith. As may have been the problem in Nazareth, we may not come to Him for healing, or, with our unbelief, we may put up other barriers to His miraculous work.
Whether in those ways, related to Jesus’s ordinariness and our expectations, or in other ways, we all sin—with thoughts, words, and deeds that we should not have, say, and do but do, or with thoughts, words, and deeds that we should have, say, and do but do not. Our actual sin and our sinful nature that leads to our actual sin warrant temporal and eternal death, apart from repentance and faith in Jesus, the Christ. So, God calls and thereby enables us to repent, and, when we repent, then God forgives us our sin, all our sin, whatever our sin might be, for the sake of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of Mary.
In order for Him to save us, we needed the Christ to be both human and Divine: human to die on the cross for us, and Divine for His sacrifice on the cross to be sufficient for the sins of the whole world. And, as the Son of Mary and the Son of God, Jesus is precisely that, human and Divine. In tonight’s First Reading, the angel Gabriel is almost struggling, as if that were possible, to describe what we might consider an in-describable miracle: the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity’s taking on human flesh. Mary would conceive and would bear a Son and would call His name Jesus, but He would also be great and be called the Son of the Most High and receive the throne of His father David and reign over the house of Jacob forever and have no end to His Kingdom. As one author put it, the Christ was born covered in His mother’s human blood and would die covered in His own human blood (Hagan, CPR 31:1, p.59), and, we might add, that that same human blood of the Christ continues to be a part of the way that He saves us.
Ordinariness and expectations also can be issues when it comes to the ways that the Christ saves us. His Word read and preached to groups like this one may seem too ordinary and not meet our expectations. Likewise, His Word applied to individuals with water in Holy Baptism, with the pastor’s touch in individual Holy Absolution, and with the bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Altar that are His Body and Blood may seem too ordinary and not meet our expectations, or maybe they may seem too extra-ordinary and not meet our expectations for that or other reasons. But, as God chose for the Christ to be incarnate of the Virgin Mary, so God has chosen to use these ways to rescue us from death and the devil, to forgive our sin, and to give us life and salvation. The God Who took on human flesh now sends human messengers to forgive our sin in these ways that include His own human blood. We do best to not take offense at His wisdom and His mighty works, however they are done!
So forgiven through God’s Means of Grace, we who repent begin to cooperate in our doing good works in keeping with our vocations, including our understanding and accepting that the Son of Mary is the Christ. Of course, unlike the people of Nazareth, we did not previously know Him for any length of time as a carpenter, nor did we previously (nor do we still) know His relatives. We trust in the Christ as He is revealed to us, not questioning His ordinariness or His extra‑ordinariness or measuring Him by our own expectations. We can even rightly call His Virgin Mother the “God bearer” and “Mother of our Lord”, and, without either under‑appreciating or over-appreciating her, we can rightly observe festivals of Christ of which she is an important part, such as the Annunciation of Our Lord on March 25th, the Visitation on May 31st, and the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Our Lord on February 2nd. To be sure, the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke has the right balance, including both the Divinely‑inspired Elizabeth’s calling Mary “blessed” among women (Luke 1:41-42; confer Luke 1:48) and Jesus’s own comment to someone who called His mother blessed that all those are blessed who hear the word of God and keep it (Luke 11:27-28; see also Luke 8:19-21, especially in light of Mark 3:21, 31-35; confer Matthew 12:46-50), and that includes you and me.
“Whose Son is the Christ?” As we have considered tonight, the Christ is the “Son of Mary”. People may have taken and may still take offense at the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity’s birth of a human mother into a human family, but such was necessary for us and for our salvation. Next week we will consider the Christ as the “Son of Joseph”. Until then, as for eternity, in the words of our Additional Psalm, we sing of the steadfast love of the Lord and with our mouths we make known His faithfulness to all generations.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +