Tuesday
of the Fourth Week of Advent
(I Samuel
1:24-28; Luke 1:46-56)
If we were with
Mary when she exclaimed, “He has cast down the mighty…and lifted up the lowly,”
we might have asked, “Where? When?” These
things have not yet happened. Jesus has
not yet done his work. However, Mary is
not recording history; she is preaching gospel.
She takes her experience and projects it onto the world. Because she, a lowly maiden, has been exalted
by God, she knows others will be as well.
Mary here
is not unlike John preaching in the desert.
He says he baptizes with water, but the one to come will baptize with
the Holy Spirit. John means that the
conversion sealed by his baptism will be magnified with the Holy Spirit. Similarly,
John Winthrop preached to the Puritans as they were about to sail to
America. In a famous discourse he said they
would be blessed tenfold if they kept to the Lord’s ways.
This is a time of blessing. We should not bemoan too long the Covid virus but anticipate its blessings. We can make this a truly memorable Christmas. Then we will cherish it in the future, perhaps more than any other. We can read at home of Christ’s birth in Luke and then pray for travelers and the poor. We can take time to listen to family members, to understand their perceptions, and to reconcile grievances. We can bake cookies, take them at the door of the isolated, and wave to them in the window. In these ways the gospel preached of Christ will be fulfilled.
