This Week: Advent 4C
Gospel: Luke 1:39-45(46-55)
The baby leaps in the womb! What an image! It is beautiful … and kind of complicated when we think about it. We want to honor the image of a John recognizing the presence of the Messiah in Mary—that is the story’s point, of course. Just don’t think about the details very hard. And I don’t mean the historical stuff, but the basic idea of presence, consciousness, and what it all means.
Why is he responding to her voice? What is in it? How is this even a thing that can happen?
If we consider what people two thousand years ago actually thought was happening, we’d see a completely different reading of this moment.
Their understanding doesn’t match the modern vision of human development. For hundreds of years people treated children like a miniature adults. We see this revealed in old paintings in which babies look like thirty-year-old men in diapers or the belief in antiquity that men carried tiny little men in their sperm that get implanted in the woman to essentially grow big enough to be born. Consider this! And then realize what a revelation modern thought has been to recognize that we are mammals who grow and change and become.
It is hard to imagine a time before human development was a given. But this was the norm for centuries. Little men swimming about, then getting bigger. What an idea!
And because we are not tiny adults in the womb, fully conscious and capable, the idea of a six-month’s along John recognizing the potential of a zygote Jesus is both a literalism problem for the modern mind, but represents a kind of physical stumbling block to the imagination, regardless of when you choose to believe “life” begins—it isn’t consciousness or fullness or anything recognizable as the kind of experience Elizabeth is having with Mary—the kind of synergy of awareness between mothers-to-be and their sons-to-be.
It is fair to say that the people obsessing about the contours of development in this story probably have other axes to grind. But I think it is worth digging into this and thinking about it before we decide to preach for ten minutes about John’s awareness knowing at least one person in the room is wondering how that even works.
The more interesting part
of the story is the Magnificat. Hands down. And right about the time we start to think that all of this talk of a love revolution is getting tiresome and maybe we focus on something else, is about the time we need to see the through line, right? The reason we keep seeing this over again in the gospel is it keeps showing up in the gospel. Since the apocalyptic talk at the end of Ordinary Time, when we heard about the way of the world being wrong and when we heard about the destruction of the Temple and about the Temple stealing from widows and John the Baptist calling us to repent and to be generous and not to exploit others … at a certain point we ought to recognize the common theme, right?
This, of course, gets coded by some as “political” which itself also conveniently becomes coded as synonymous with “liberal”. So we better focus on the personal people will argue. Ignoring, of course, how that gets coded “conservative” today. That’s inconvenient.
Anyway, what we’re dealing with is a young woman singing about the glory of God who has found grace in believing in her. That God has promised to undermine the powerful and lift up the lowly. This is the gospel as she receives it and the gospel that she celebrates. And it also happens to be the person chosen to birth Jesus into the world.
Knowing what it is that God wants to do, what this incarnation would be, entrusting that with this young woman is, perhaps, God’s most political act. And hers was in saying yes to all of it.