Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, B, Vigil
December 23, 2023
To listen to an audio recording of the brief homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us on the Fourth Sunday of Advent and on Christmas. Because the Fourth Sunday and Christmas take place this year on back-to-back days, I’d like to try to mention both in our conversation today. On Sunday this year, the Church has us ponder Mary in the mystery of the Annunciation. The Church invites us, so to speak, to climb within Mary’s womb, so that we might draw close to that womb’s Blessed Fruit as he is silently growing and try to calibrate our prayer to Mary’s contemplative heartbeat. Mary is, in a sense, Advent personified. She is the one whom God himself prepared, through her Immaculate Conception, for the incarnation and birth of his Son, the Word of God. What lessons do we learn from Mary, especially as we ponder the scene of the Archangel Gabriel’s visit to her asking if she would become the mother of the Son of God?
* The first thing is that we need to allow God to clean our interior abode, as God did so with Mary through her Immaculate Conception. God gives us that grace through baptism and confession. In this way, Mary each Advent continues the work of St. John the Baptist, gently, maternally, calling us to be free from sin so that, like her, we may welcome God within. Have you made a good confession yet this Advent?
* The second thing Mary helps us to do is to pray. She is a model of prayer. Her expectant prayer was the culmination of the centuries of supplications of the Jewish people awaiting the Messiah. She treasured everything in her heart. She longed for God. The Archangel Gabriel said to her, “The Lord is with you,” and she sought always to be with the Lord. Mary wants to help us during these days to enter her contemplative academy. May we be good students!
* The third thing Mary wants to help us learn is amazement at the mysteries we’re celebrating. As pure as she was, as much as she prayed, little could she have ever imagined that the long-awaited Messiah would be God the Son and that God the Son would be her son according to the flesh. She became for nine months the living temple of God! Sometimes, when the practice of faith becomes routine, we can lose our sense of wonder. The Church has us ponder Mary to help us rekindle the wonder of our minds and hearts at the mystery of the incarnation, not merely 2,000 years ago, but now, in the ongoing incarnation of the holy Eucharist.
* Fourth, Mary teaches us about how God’s life is meant to grow within us and change our life. Like the baby Jesus did in Mary’s life, Jesus wants to take on our flesh, to change the way we eat, sleep, walk and live, and eventually become so big that we can no longer contain him within. “What took place for Mary,” Pope Benedict once said, “can daily take place in each of us, in the hearing of the word and in the celebration of the sacraments.” It not only can take place, but is supposed to, if only we learn from Mary how to cooperate.
* So the way we need to prepare for Christmas is to relive Mary’s mystery in Christ: to live by faith, like her, to abandon ourselves to God’s love, to entrust ourselves to his plan. That’s what the Church underlines this year on the Fourth Sunday of Advent.
* That brings us to Christmas. There are four different Gospels to ponder: at the Vigil Mass, we hear St.
