On this Fourth and last Sunday of Advent, we can ask: What have we learned during the Advent season? And we can also ask: What are we looking for at Christmas that is about to begin?
Today’s first reading, from Micah, a prophet of the eighth century, teaches us that the match between a divine promise and the event it foreshadows is seldom precise, and in some cases widely different. An example is the promise of Micah. Instead of referring to the great King David by his name, Micah mentions his low-born father; instead of mentioning the city of David, the grand city of Jerusalem, the prophet mentions the small town of Bethlehem, the insignificant seat of David’s clan, least among the clans of Judah. Why does the prophet underline insignificance in speaking of the most famous king in the history of Israel? One answer surely is that the prophet wants to underline the hand of God in David’s rise; David’s grandeur was not because of David’s ancestry or personal gifts, but exclusively because of God’s favor.
The offer made to David never expired. Batteries expire, drugs expire, but not God’s promises. They retain their power with no expiration date. We see how true this is when we look at the Gospel. The promise of a Davidic king of humble origin is fulfilled by Mary’s “yes.” What a wondrous and strange fulfillment of a sign given to Israel a thousand years before!
Elsewhere in God’s story we also see God’s the upholding of ordinary people and things. In the New Testament, Mary and Elizabeth are village women, unnoticed by the world similar to Micah’s description of David as lowly, yet they play a role in world history, because God raised them up. The second extraordinary thing in God’s story is that women exercise leadership. Elizabeth’s husband and priest Zechariah, though a decent man, was somehow deficient in his response to the angel. But not his wife, Elizabeth. She gets it right about the role of John the Baptist and of Jesus. Women’s leadership at turning points is not as rare in the Bible as some think. In the book of Exodus, for example, when Israel’s existence as a people was close to extinction, it was the risk-taking actions of five women – the two Hebrew midwives, the mother and the sister of Moses, and Pharaoh’s daughter – that enabled the Hebrews to survive the genocide. Later, Deborah the prophet became so skilled in war that her general Barack would not go to battle without her. In the New Testament, the only disciples who remained by Jesus on the cross were women. And today, women increasingly exercise a pivotal role in church life, continuing to show manifest the Lord’s quiet role in ruling the world.