May Jesus Christ be
praised and may his holy Mother pray for us.
Today we celebrate the
fourth Sunday of Advent. It seems like
only yesterday that we were beginning the Advent season. The four weeks of preparation are now reduced
to only a few days. Our time of
preparation for the great feast of our Lord’s birth is coming to an end.
On the first Sunday of
Advent, we were invited to prepare ourselves for the Lord’s return at the end
of history. The prophet Isaiah invited
us to wait with patience for the kingdom of peace. On the second and third Sundays of Advent, we
heard the preaching of John the Baptist calling us to repentance for our sins
and directing us to look to the Lord Jesus as the promised Messiah. During these days we have also celebrated the
great feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and we have
remembered with great devotion the appearance of Our Lady at Guadalupe. We have listened attentively to the prophetic
word of John. We have received the great
gift of the Father’s love in the maternal protection of the Virgin Mary and we
await the celebration of the birth of our Savior. Today, however, in these final days of
preparation for the feast of the nativity of the Lord Jesus, the Lord gives us
one more gift and one more example.
Today we are given the gift of Saint Joseph, the righteous man and the
model of fatherhood.
In our gospel reading today,
we encounter Saint Joseph. He is a righteous man and is betrothed to Mary. He knows that his beloved Mary is pregnant
and that the child she bears is not his.
A devout follower of the law, Joseph was not willing to expose Mary to
the penalties of the law. Saint Joseph
is a man of justice and silence, not a man of vengeance and impatience. In the soul of Joseph the swords of anger had
been beaten into the plowshares of peace.
In the same way as the
patriarch Joseph of the book of Genesis, the Lord reveals his will to Saint
Joseph in a dream. The angel of the
Lord, calling Joseph by name and recognizing him as a descendant of the royal
house of David, tells him not to be afraid to welcome Mary into his home. The angel announces to Saint Joseph that the
words of the prophet Isaiah, that the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and
he shall be called Emmanuel, were being fulfilled in Mary. And now Joseph would share in the fatherly
role of the heavenly Father, and he would name the child Jesus.
In his letter to the
Romans the apostle Paul tells us that he has received the grace of apostleship
for the sake of the name. The apostles
in the book of Acts, and generation after generation of disciples of the Lord
Jesus, even to our own day, have rejoiced that they have been found worthy to
suffer for the sake of the name. Only
one however, was found worthy to give the name.
Saint Joseph will stand in the temple, on the eighth day after the
Lord’s birth, and declare “His name is Jesus.”
At the conclusion of
his sacred dream, Saint Joseph awoke and followed the command of the angel of
the Lord. Joseph welcomed Mary and the
gift of the unborn Christ that she bore into his home. In humble silence and believing the Lord’s
word spoken to him, Saint Joseph prepared for the nativity of the Lord Jesus.
My brothers and sisters
let us join Saint Joseph in these final days as we prepare to celebrate the
human birth of the Savior of the world.
In moments of humble silence, let us welcome Mary into our homes, so
that she might present her Son to us and us to her Son. And let us proclaim with Saint Joseph, that
more than important the gifts and the gatherings and the travels, is that we
have seen the promised Messiah of God, and His name is Jesus!
Preached
at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, Monroe, NC
