Third Sunday of Advent – 17 December 2023
Last Tuesday, we celebrated the feastday of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a title of the Virgin Mary associated with a celebrated image housed in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
Accounts state that on the morning of 9 December 1531, Juan Diego saw an apparition of a maiden at the Hill of Tepeyac. Speaking to him in the native language, the maiden asked that a church be built at that site in her honor; from her words. Diego recounted the events to the Archbishop of Mexico City who instructed him to return to Tepeyac Hill, and ask the “lady” for a miraculous sign to prove her identity. The first sign was the Virgin healing Juan’s uncle. The Virgin told Juan Diego to gather flowers from the top of Tepeyac Hill, where he found roses, not native to Mexico, blooming in December on the normally barren hilltop. The Virgin arranged the flowers in his cloak, and when Juan Diego opened his cloak before the bishop on December 12, the flowers fell to the floor, and on the fabric was the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The tilma has become Mexico’s most popular religious and cultural symbol, and now the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the most visited Catholic site in the world.
The account of our Our Lady of Guadalupe helps us recognise where and how the life of God becomes present for us – God reveals his plans for us amongst the little ones of this world – and that means you and me – and in all the ordinariness of our own families and friendships. This is what it means to believe in an incarnate God: a God who has become enfleshed in the circle of our own families and communities, in the dramas of our own struggles. God chose Juan Diego, a simple farmer, to show forth his invitation and to bring hope to the Mexican people. And indeed this is a reflection of the entire history of salvation – the small one, the marginal one, the one without status or power is the one chosen to bring the message that something new is happening.
There is something quite extraordinary in this when we reflect back over the history of God’s relationship with his people. Next week we will celebrate how it is to the shepherds, those socially outcast, that the birth of the Saviour is first announced; that it is to the Magi, those completely outside the context of the acceptable religion, that the revelation of God is given. But if this be truly so, then there is also an undeniable responsibility placed upon ourselves by this recognition. Who will bring the good news to our own neighborhood that something different has occurred in Christ’s coming, that the world is no longer the same because of the birth of Jesus, that a an entirely new possibility has dawned in the midst of all of our questions, frustrations and hopes by virtue of the story of Christmas? There is a part of us that can think this is someone else’s task, that this is the role of the Church as if the Church were an institution to which we belonged but that somehow exists and acts independently of ourselves.
The responsibility of bringing the good news of what Christ’s birth into our world might mean belongs to us, or the message simply doesn’t get proclaimed. We recount today in the gospel how John the Baptist heralds the coming of the Lord. But each of us must become John the Baptist. We remember him because in him we see our own responsibility. And what the Mexican Juan Diego, nearly five centuries ago, teaches us is that in regards to this responsibility I cannot use the excuse that I am not trained enough or sufficiently skilled, or that God normally chooses a different kind of person than me.
No, God chooses me. I am his messenger. That is the point of my baptism. My baptism is not simply for my benefit, as if it were a kind of passport to salvation. My baptism is a responsibility to show forth in the world that Someone is coming towards us, looking to encounter us, offering us new insight and an invitation to see the world and our life together in a new way.
And how do we do show forth to those around us the good news? We do so, in particular, by our joy. As Pope Francis has written, we should not be like those returning from a funeral. However, joy does not mean happiness. Often enough, for different reasons, we do not feel happy. However, we can still offer joy to each other. This the great paradox we need to identify in respect to this. Happiness is a feeling that rises and falls. But joy is the constant recognition that the person in front of me holds something of the light of Christ; joy is the gentle realisation that there is always something more than what I might be struggling with at the moment; joy is the profound awareness that I am not defined by my anxieties, or by my memories, or by my mistakes but rather by an embrace of Love that holds me eternally.
When I am truly joyful in this sense, then I experience a tremendous freedom. Yes, even in the midst of what I might be struggling with, with genuine joy I can still reach out to another. Joy creates the space in which, whatever my circumstances, I can still offer someone something – a simple smile, a simple gesture of kindness, a word of gratitude and encouragement. And as I offer something as simple as these things, even in the midst of what might be pre-occupying me, then I am giving witness to the possibility of what we celebrate in the story of Jesus – a new way of seeing myself and others.
Every one of us is called to be a missionary, a herald of the Good News, and not one of us is too ordinary or too little to be so. This is what we proclaim in our memory of John the Baptist, and what we celebrate in our memory of Juan Diego in Guadalupe in the suburbs of Mexico. May our own joy in life, the outcome of our expectation about who comes to greet us in our life, be the light that shines in our city.
