New Year's Day 2009

Homily for New Year’s Day: Mary the Mother of God 1 January 2009 The first impulse of the Church at the start of each new year is to confide ourselves afresh to the maternal care of Our Lady and to ask for her prayers to assist us as we make our first steps into the unknown- and not for many years has a new year seemed so unknown as this, when we face the colossal financial uncertainties in which the whole world is gripped. I try to read nowadays the business pages of the newspaper every day to see if I can understand what’s going on, but even the so-called experts who write the articles seem never to agree on how bad things are going to be or what it is going to feel like or how long this recession is going to last. And of course there is no shortage of religious people also wading in with their own predictions, their own take on these financial developments. Most of what they write annoys me I must say- I don’t like being told that being poor is going to be good for me! We will get our priorities right, they seem to suggest, once we are broke. Well, maybe….I find all that rather patronising, for who wants to be told that this is going to be good for you whether you like it or not? So now here I am this morning, yet another religious person, but not a patronising one I hope- and what is my take on all this? Well, I have no take actually. But one thing I do want to share with you, and that is a message that I have found this Christmas striking me with a new urgency in the familiar Gospel stories of the birth of Christ. You know of course that only two of the Gospels give us accounts of Jesus’s birth: Matthew and Luke. Let’s recall what Luke tells us first of all. Luke begins his Gospel not with the birth of Our Lord, but with the conception of John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus who will be his herald, the last of the prophets announcing the coming of the Messiah, the one whom our Orthodox brethren call simply “John the Forerunner.” Elizabeth, barren and past child-bearing age anyway, is suddenly pregnant, and the angel Gabriel comes to John’s father Zechariah to tell him this astounding news. When he sees the angel, standing by the altar just as he is about to perform his liturgical duties, he is of course frightened- Luke says “fear fell upon him”. But Luke goes on to say that the angel speaks to Zechariah and his opening words are “Do not be afraid!”- “Do not be afraid, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you shall call his name John, and you will have joy and gladness”. Do not be afraid- this is the refrain we hear no less than three times in the infancy narrative of Luke. You remember that this is what Gabriel also says to Our Lady when he greets her “Hail, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!” Mary too, like Zechariah, is bewildered by this sudden apparition, Luke tells us that “she was greatly troubled….and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be”. At once the angel says to her “Do not be afraid, for you have found favour with God”. And the third time we hear this saying is when an angel appears to those humble ordinary people, the shepherds, who were on duty that cold dark night, out in the fields watching their flock of sheep. They too were scared stiff- Luke says “they were filled with fear”. What does the old carol say? “Mighty dread had filled their troubled minds”. And what is the first thing the angel says to them? “Be not afraid” - “Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people”. And when we turn to Matthew’s Gospel we find the same thing. Where Luke has concentrated very much on Our Lady and showing us everything from Mary’s point of view, Matthew instead concentrates more on the person of Joseph. (One reason he does this is that he is anxious to show how Jesus fulfils all the criteria that the prophets had given through the centuries about the Messiah, and of course one thing they all agreed on was that the Messiah would come from the House of David, and Joseph was a descendant of David). Matthew begins his account by telling us that Joseph and Mary have got engaged, and that Joseph at first doesn’t know what to do when he finds out that Our Lady is pregnant. He thinks, doesn’t he, that maybe the best thing will be to divorce her privately. Matthew goes on to tell us “but as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream”. The angel explains that Mary is with child by the Holy Spirit- and he begins with the words “Joseph, son of David, do not fear”. “Do not fear to take Mary your wife”. And so you see no less than four times in the Christmas stories we hear the angels saying “Do not be afraid!” They are saying that to us too this Christmas if we will listen- at this holy season as my favourite carol says there are “angels bending near the earth to tune their harps of gold”. The carol goes on “But man at war with man hears not the love-song that they bring”. That is the risk we run when we are so consumed with all our worries about the future, that we do not listen! There are many people, many insistent voices, clamouring for our attention, especially now with news coming in every day of this or that bank collapsing, this or that firm laying off its workers, this or that politician promising all kinds of solutions and blaming everyone but themselves. We need to stay calm in all this maelstrom that is surging around us. We need to do two things, it seems to me. One is to use our brain, to use the brain that God has given us, to try to think as clearly as we can about what’s happening and how it will affect us personally. That is what Zechariah did: once he had heard Gabriel’s message he began thinking- “How shall I know this?” And it is what Our Lady did: she was thinking fast from the moment of the Archangel’s greeting when “she considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be”. Luke says “And Mary said to the angel, How shall this be, since I have no husband?” The other is to listen and take to heart the angels’ message to us- “Do not be afraid!” “Hush your noise” as the carol says “hear the love-song that they bring”. Let us advance into this year of grace 2009 in a spirit of confidence, inspired by the message that the angels bring us. Let us listen to the voice of God in our lives, those promptings of the Holy Spirit that will come to us in the quiet of our prayers and in our reflecting on the Word of God in the Scriptures; let us be like Mary in this, and “treasure all these things and ponder them” in our hearts, and then we may be like her in this too, that “we have found favour with God”. As we listen to the angels announcing to us the good news, of “peace to men who enjoy his favour” let us put aside our fears as the angels bid us, and may God “be gracious and bless us” as we walk into the unknown in the company of Our Lord and his Blessed Mother. Amen.