ADVENT 4 2009
Micah 5.2–5a; Hebrews 10.5–10; Luke 1.39–45
The Christian faith is a physical, bodily faith as much as it is a spiritual one. It is rooted in the lives of real people, real events in history, and in particular, it is rooted in human bodies. The Christian faith is being lived out here by real people in St Mark’s and St Anne’s in our particular time, just as much as it was lived in the days of King Herod of Judea 2000 years ago. Our faith is an incarnational faith. It is centred on the Word-made-flesh, born of a woman. As Archbishop Rowan Williams says, God has chosen to reveal himself in a complete human life; a birth, childhood, adult ministry and a death. God experiences everything we experience and understands the trials we live through. The Christian faith, therefore, is not just something “spiritual”. God chooses to come to us as a human being, to share our flesh and blood. Christianity is a physical religion.
The ministry of Jesus was to human bodies. He came to open eyes so that they could see; ears that they could hear, to loosen tongues so that they could speak. He came to be food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, release to the captives. The gospel text before us is the story of the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth. This, too, is a story about bodies. The two women are pregnant. There is a foetus that moves and kicks. There is an exchange of greetings and hugs, mouths speaking and songs being sung. Elizabeth hears and believes and proclaims. We notice the elaborate greeting, the loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Our attention is drawn to Elizabeth’s hearing and her speaking. This is a hearing and a speaking of Good News, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is established through this hearing and speaking, through the physicality of the encounter: through John the Baptist leaping in her womb, through their conversation, through the Spirit working through all these things. The Christian faith is a physical one. God communicates through our bodies and through real and physical events in real human lives.
This is the Good News that we will celebrate when Christmas finally comes; God becoming human, God speaking to us in our own language, through a real body and a real human life. The technical term for our celebration of Christmas is “incarnation and atonement”; incarnation means God becoming one with us in our humanity. The atonement could be called “at-one-ment” our humanity being united to God, being made one with God. So at Christmas we celebrate God becoming one with us in our humanity so that we can be united to the divine, so that we can be made one with God again. Today we mark the very beginning of Jesus’ fully human life, the moment of his conception in the womb of Mary.
The physicality of the Christian faith has had huge implications down through the ages. Later on in the gospel a woman will shout praise to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and breasts that nursed you!” (Luke 11:27). When Jesus replies he echoes the words of Elizabeth, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and practise it!”
Jesus could have said, “Blessed are those who embody the word of God and who bear it into the world,” for that is what is what Mary does when she says “Yes” to becoming the mother of Jesus. This is what the gospel calls us to be and do. The “Word” is not a collection of cerebral beliefs, something to be received and believed in our heads. The Word of God is to be embodied in our humanity, in our lives, in our relationships, in our experiences, and in our commitments. God longs for the Word to be embodied in our human lives, a living presence in our lives, the word written on our hearts rather than on tablets of stone. The season of Advent is the time given us by the Church to prepare our hearts for this, so that our lives and hearts will be the stable where the Word of God it to be born; so that by God’s grace, we become another Mary, another human body in which the Word becomes flesh and is lived in a real human life.
One of the ways that the church has helped us understand this is to use our bodies in our prayer. Christian worship invites us to use our bodies. Some people choose to make a sign of the cross in worship. We have records as old as the 2nd century showing that Christians have made the sign of the cross, usually when receiving a blessing or when we want to acknowledge that we are in the presence of God. The sign of the cross is a physical way of saying that we belong to Christ. Some people also choose to make three signs of the cross when the gospel reading is announced: one on the forehead, one on the lips and one on the heart. The three crosses are a physical way of saying, “May Christ be in my thinking and in my speaking and in my heart.” Some people choose to bow as well; to bow before the altar to acknowledge that the table is central in our worship because that is where bread and wine become for us the body and blood of Christ. There may be bows to acknowledge the holiness of Christ, and in the creed some people choose to bow at the words “he came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary” to acknowledge the Word-made-flesh. Bishop Victoria has introduced the act of prostration at ordinations, where the candidate to be ordained lies prostrate on the ground to indicate their solidarity with Christ’s costly laying down of his life for the world on the cross. It is a reminder to us all that our wills need to be broken and shaped to the purposes of God. And then there is the sign of peace, which involves physical touch. And finally, the central act of Christian prayer is the Eucharist in which Christ nourishes our bodies through bread and wine. All these physical actions in prayer are given to us to help us express our faith in bodily form, because Christianity is a faith practiced in real bodies and in real human lives.
The writer to the Hebrews reminds us that Jesus came into the world in a real human body. He came to do the Father’s will, so that the Word would become flesh. Isaiah says that when the Word of God is spoken it does not return empty but fulfils the purpose for which it is sent. But it can only do that by becoming embodied in a real human life. That is why our faith is physical and why Mary is so central in our faith. Mary is an archetype for all of us. The Word was enfleshed in her body. It is because of her faithfulness that Jesus had a body. God sends us the angel Gabriel and asks us to receive the Word. He is calling us to allow our hearts to be the place where the Spirit of God may conceive the Word in our bodies so that we too might bear Jesus in live and present Christ to the world.
At the heart of the Christian faith is a woman who said, “Let it be with me according to your word.” Indeed, may that be our prayer to God. May our prayer be, “May your will be done in the body you have given me.”
