Tuesday 3 December 2019

Advent Breathing Space 1: God's message of love to Mary





Nazareth McDonald's, where Jesus used to get his burgers...
Earlier this year, as you may know, Philip and I visited Nazareth, the site of our Gospel story. It’s a busy, crowded town now, and the coach dropped us off at a rather unimposing square beside the main road, opposite Nazareth McDonalds.
The reconstructed (but not functional) well head,
built for the millennium celebrations
  
In the centre of the square stood a not terribly inspiring reconstruction of an old well head, with three spouts, but no water, under the shelter of a semi-circular modern structure. Behind it was an ancient Greek Orthodox church – there had been a church there from the  4th Century, though it had been rebuilt many times -  which housed the spring that fed the well. To get to the spring you had to squeeze down a narrow passage, to a rather dismal looking damp hole in the ground lit by bright lights powered by a tangle of very dodgy looking electric wiring. It was almost completely empty of water, but that didn’t seem to have deterred the pilgrims who had thrown a large number of coins and prayers written on scraps of paper into it. Like many sites in the Holy Land it was an incongruous mixture of ancient and modern, sacred and mundane.
The original spring, in the Greek
Orthodox Church of the Annunciation



This, we were told, was the main water source in Nazareth at the time Jesus was born. Its significance, though, lay in the story we have heard in the Gospel today. Luke’s story of the annunciation is set in an unnamed location, but the assumption is that Gabriel comes to Mary in her home.  But early legend, in a document called the “Protoevangelion of James” says that the angel made not one but two visits to Mary, and that the first of them was at this well. She’d come to gather water when Gabriel spoke to her, but she was so alarmed by his message that she ran off home. He had to come to her again there, in the story Luke tells us.

Whether it’s true or not, I like that tale. Hearing angelic voices is probably terrifying enough in itself, but if that voice tells you that you are going to bear a child when you know that ought to be impossible, and you also know that it will cause a scandal which might destroy you, it’s quite understandable that you might not want to stick around to hear more. Some news takes a bit of getting used to. Sometimes it’s only when it’s repeated that we find the courage to believe it. It can take even longer for us to realise that challenging news might also be good news. But that’s what happens to Mary. Whether it took one visit or two, she found the courage to say, “Here I am Lord, ready to do your will.” She had the faith to see that whatever was happening, if God was part of it, it was going to turn out to be good news.
Mary's house, allegedly, in the Roman Catholic
Basilica of the Annunciation



In the Psalm we heard today, the psalmist made the same declaration of faith. “Here I am; I delight to do your will, your law is within my heart”  He has learned, it seems, that God is a god of steadfast love and faithfulness. He has learned it by heart, by deciding to trust God’s word again and again and again until it becomes second nature, something he can’t help but pay attention to.  

At our Messy Church session a week or so ago, we made a giant picture frame for people to have their photos taken in – it’s at the back of church. Around its edge it proclaims“Jesus is God’s message of love,” but we’d be forgiven for not immediately seeing that message of love in the circumstances of Jesus' birth and much of what happens to him in adulthood too. He is born as a poor baby, with only a manger for a bed, to parents who have already been driven the length of the country on the whim of the distant Emperor of Rome, and will soon have an even longer journey, fleeing the wrath of another ruler, Herod, and becoming refugees in Egypt. When he is grown he will wander the countryside with nowhere to lay his head, challenged and opposed at every turn by those in authority, until they finally crucify him as a trouble maker.  As Teresa of Avila is supposed once to have said when she and her nuns were enduring hard times, “ if this is how you treat your friends, God, is it any wonder you have so few of them”. And yet through this beleaguered and man, battered and bruised, despised and rejected, all the world will be blessed. “You have given me an open ear” says the Psalmist. Mary could have said the same thing. Her ears are open to God, open in the faith that whatever God is up to, he is a God of love, and so he can’t be up to anything but love in and through what he is asking of her.

In our next two Breathing Space communions we’ll try to open our ears to the good news that Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist hears, and the good news that the Shepherds hear on their cold dark hillside, but I pray most of all that we will have an “open ear” for the good news that God is speaking to us this Advent, the messages of love he sends to us in the birth of the Christ child.
Amen








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