Archbishop of Sydney

Fourth Sunday of Advent

St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Is 7:10-14; Rom 1:1-7; Mt 1:18-24

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
23/12/2007

We are now almost on the eve of Christmas, but there is still time to perform at least some of the tasks we should have performed before Christmas e.g. go to confession, the sacrament of reconciliation, to make those Christmas phone calls to friends or sick or lonely, to make a donation to help the battlers, to evaluate our spiritual and family preparation for the birth of Christ.

Once we have celebrated this feast for a few years we can be locked into the same patterns of thought, not entering more deeply into the mystery of God’s Son becoming a helpless little child and looking at the whole celebration through worldly and uncomprehending eyes. Those of us who have to preach regularly on the theme of Christmas are aware of this danger but the pressures to say something different from what we said in the past few years (in case someone remembers! and sometimes individuals do) drive us to try to understand better and explain more clearly. There is no guarantee this ambition results in its achievement.

In Italy today one of the better known Catholic writers is Princess Alexandra Borghese. Born a Catholic into one of Italy’s most famous families, she lived and worked for years in New York and was part of an international set of young aristocrats and the super rich. Tragedy struck more than once in her life and eventually through a strongly Catholic friend, she turned her back on this pagan world, converted and is now a serious Catholic, publicly committed to explaining the importance of Christ. She called the story of her life (she is still only middle aged) and conversion “With New Eyes”.

All of us should try to look on the ancient mystery of the Incarnation, on the birth of Emmanuel (God with us) with new eyes.

Paul’s letter to the Christians of Rome, whose beginning we heard as the second reading, might provide a starting point for us.

Paul was not one of Christ’s chosen twelve and we have no evidence that he met or heard Our Lord during his three years of teaching. We all know Paul was a persecutor approving of the stoning of St. Stephen the first martyr.

Therefore he was a spectacular convert, neither being born into a Christian family, nor part of the first circle of followers.

He came to believe that he was directly called by the Risen Lord to announce that the prophecies and hints in the Jewish scriptures had found their fulfilment in Jesus Christ. This was a new and extraordinary claim, destructive of the Jewish common sense of the time. Today the appropriate clichés in reaction would be that it was “too much” or “over the top” or “way outside” or “unreal”.

This Son of God was a Son of David, a Jewish king from 1000 years beforehand, the son of Mary and therefore a member of that small difficult people from the Eastern Mediterranean, the Jews who had significant communities in many of the larger cities around the Mediterranean and along the trade routes to the East.

At a richer, deeper and more spiritual level this young man Christ was recognized or proclaimed as the Son of God through his resurrection from the dead.

Knowing and accepting this is not like accessing another piece of information. For Paul it meant that he had a mission as an apostle “to preach the obedience of faith to all pagan nations”. Those who accept Christian claims are “God’s beloved” and called to be saints through God’s grace and with God’s peace.

All this is the theological backdrop to the mystery of the annunciation, Joseph’s bafflement at Mary’s pregnancy, the birth in a stable, the slaughter of the innocents and the flight into Egypt.

And Paul’s claims are that key to explaining the ambiguous references by the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, more than 500 years before Christ’s birth, about the sign promised by God: “the maiden is with child and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call Emmanuel, a name which means ‘God is with us’”.

There is plenty to ponder for all of us in the mystery of Christmas; but there is a challenge too.

It is only the person “with clean hands and pure heart, who desires not worthless things” who is able to climb the mountain of the Lord and stand in his holy place.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.