Readings: Micah 5; 2-5a; The Song of Mary, Hebrews 10: 5-10; Luke 1: 39-45
We come to the fourth Sunday of Advent and to a lovely story in St. Luke’s Gospel – the story of the Visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth. In relationship to the gospels for the last two Sundays, it’s a kind of flash-back. We’ve seen the adult John the Baptist on the second and third Sundays of Advent and now the focus shifts to John before his birth. Luke opens his gospel with two stories – the annunciation of the birth of John the Baptist and the annunciation of the birth of Jesus. The two are told as separate stories – with some common features; the angel Gabriel is the bearer of the news in both stories. In our gospel reading this morning, the two stories come together.
I began last week with a story from long service leave some years ago. Perhaps I could return there for a moment. Libbie and I had moved on to Italy from the United States. We were in Florence – for many years we’d wanted to see the Uffizi Gallery and finally we were there – after two hours of queuing. There are paintings by well-known great masters, of course – Leonardo, Botticelli among them. I walked into one of the smaller rooms in the gallery and I happened to glance at a smaller picture just by the door – and I was just spellbound. It was a painting of the Visitation - I recognized that immediately, but what held me in front of the picture for what seemed like ages was the depiction of the greeting between Mary and Elizabeth. The picture was painted in 1503. The colours were very strong, but there was incredible softness in the picture. The artist was a Mariotto Albertinelli, whom I’d never heard of. In one sense he was perhaps an unlikely artist to have painted such a scene. A biography says of him: “Mariotto was a most restless person and carnal in the affairs of love and apt to the art of living, and, taking a dislike to the studies and brain-wracking necessary to painting, being also often stung by the tongues of other painters, as is their way, he resolved to give himself to a less laborious and more jovial profession” So he opened a tavern. The biography goes on: “But at last the low life became an annoyance to him, and, filled with remorse, he returned to painting.[1]”
I’m glad he did. The painting captures the moment of meeting – of recognition between Mary and Elizabeth. They lean close to each other and grasp hands, Elizabeth touches Mary tenderly on the shoulder. It’s easy to imagine they’re about to greet each other with a kiss. There is an amazing tenderness and grace in their moment of greeting – this moment of greeting between two humble women, ordinary women – and yet, there was to my mind when I saw it a wonderful transcendence about it as well. I had the sense when I saw it that there was something much greater going on than just a greeting between two relatives.
And of course, there is something much greater going on in our Gospel reading. Luke doesn’t tell us why Mary sets out, yet one can imagine why, perhaps. Just before this episode, Mary has been visited by Gabriel, who announces to her that she will conceive and bear a son, despite her protest that she is a virgin, and her son will be called the Son of the Most High. Mary receives this startling news by saying “Let it me with me according to your word,” giving her “Yes” to God, and so co-creating with God the possibility of blessing and salvation. But because she is not yet married, to conceive and bear a son will put her in a very precarious social position in Nazareth, and probably a precarious position with Joseph as well—after all, it is in Matthew’s account that an angel appears to Joseph to assure him of Mary’s integrity; Luke leaves us to wonder how Joseph receives the news. In one of the Advent studies from the ABM resource “Caravan” which re-imagines the stories of the incarnation in a contemporary Australian context, Joseph is a knock-about chippie who receives the news by letter. He is confused, aching, angry, even furious and hurt. Maybe Mary decides she needs the wisdom and guidance of an older woman, a trusted relative, who can understand her unusual situation. When Elizabeth hears Mary’s greeting, it touches off a series of recognitions. The “recognition scene” was a staple element in classic Greek literature, and Luke, being a fine storyteller in that style, uses that to good effect in his story. When Mary greets Elizabeth, the unborn John the Baptist in Elizabeth’s womb recognizes the presence of the unborn Jesus in Mary’s womb, and leaps for joy. Elizabeth then recognizes the meaning of her baby’s movement—not just a random kick, but a ready greeting—and in turn recognizes Mary, not primarily as a relative, but as “the mother of my Lord” and “she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
This recognition on Elizabeth’s part is not clairvoyance, but the work in her of the Holy Spirit, which empowers her to recognize realities she herself could not have witnessed firsthand. Mary, in turn, recognizes the work of the Spirit in Elizabeth’s sudden knowledge, and responds with her Magnificat, or Song of Mary, which is the Psalm for today – we sing it in the form of “Tell out my soul, the greatness of the Lord.” It is in this complex web of recognitions and recognitions-of-recognitions that the witness to the coming of the Christ emerges. No one part alone tells the whole story; but together these women and their unborn children proclaim the advent of the Lord. Something much greater indeed.
The Fourth Sunday of Advent brings us as a worshipping community of faith to the eve of the Christmas Gospel, as today’s gospel makes clear. During Advent, the gospel lessons have moved us from the grand cosmic scale of the first Sunday of Advent to a very domestic, situation this morning – two female relative meeting in a home. Yet even here in the seeming ordinary domesticity of this meeting, God is turning things upside down – one commentator calls Elizabeth and Mary living signs of the Great Reversal: two women, completely outside of the religious and social establishments recognize and prepare for the in-breaking of God in the world. They are insignificant in the eyes of patriarchal culture—one is old, one is young; one has been barren, one not yet childbearing; neither possessing status nor power—and yet they are the first to recognize the embodiment of God’s holiness in a human life. It’s a constant theme in the gospel stories surrounding the events of the anticipation of Jesus’ birth, and his actual birth, that the governors, emperors and other power brokers are of no account – God simply subverts them.
Elizabeth and Mary’s relationships—with each other, with God, with Zechariah and Joseph, with the townspeople and villagers; relationships both of support and subjugation, both suspicion and rejoicing—Elizabeth and Mary’s relationship form the fertile ground in which the incredible possibilities that God has in store can grow and flourish. Those new possibilities are gathered most obviously in the unborn John and Jesus, whose potentials will unfold in adult lives of ministry and mission. But those new possibilities are also and immediately evident in Elizabeth and Mary, in the inspiration and insight and song they share, in the way their lives are changed and redirected by the Holy Spirit.
Human relationships are complex and contradictory. Often human relationships are the framework in which tragedy, trauma, violence, evil are manifest. At the same time, however, human relationships are the framework in which unconditional love, compassion, forgiveness, goodness and peace are made manifest. As we come to the end of this Advent Season, can we look at ourselves and our own relationships? Do they provide the right framework or the fertile ground for the things of God to flourish and grow. Mary and Elizabeth’s story is one of recognition. How do we recognize the presence of Christ within and among ourselves, how are our lives are redirected, changed by the Holy Spirit.
At the start of a new Christian year, the season of Advent offers us the chance to begin our life with God and God’s creation anew. Yet this new beginning is also a return to the old unlimited promises of God for a just creation. We look back to look forward. Each year these hopes for the fulfillment of God’s promises are born again, as we look forward to the advent of the One who redefines past, present and future. May we be prepared to recognize and welcome him.
© Rev’d Bill Crossman