So if Advent is our season of waiting and expectation, what are we really waiting for in these last few days before Christmas? I think in today’s gospel we find out: We are waiting for someone to speak to us, with words about what is next — and not just generally, but next for us.
We sometimes think those words are impossible. The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said Advent waiting is like miners who are trapped in a coal mine, waiting for any noise off in the distance as a sign that someone, anyone, is coming to rescue them. Maybe especially we feel that way this year, we have all been isolated and trapped, maybe more than usually discouraged and cut off. What message could be sent to us that will change things right now, something that will bring us joy and freedom?
God does have a messenger for us, and if we have not heard that messenger maybe it’s not because the messenger isn’t there but because what God has for us is not something we’re quite ready for. Mary was told she was blessed among women, but also that her next task, and really her life’s task, was something very hard, hard to believe and hard to do. Her immediate yes can’t have been an easy one even for this serious young woman, but she was someone who believed that God could speak to us, and that it would be good news, even if it was news that changed everything about her life.
That is God is chipping away at us here in the coal mine, God interacting with us, pursuing us, speaking to us, and pulling us forward. Whatever is next for us might be joyful or difficult or both; it might be taking something on or letting something go. It may not be something we want at all that God wants to put before us, and I can tell you that in my own case this year, I think that’s very much been the case with me. But whatever it is, you know it is the message of the angel because it is pushing you onwards to more love, more love for those close to you, more love for those you find it impossible to love, more love in service to this world. The reading about the annunciation to Mary is about a life interrupted and changed, and turned upside down, not a life always made easier. The transformation that Mary began in this gospel did not bring her safety and prosperity. Instead it brought her a life of complete unselfishness and a life of intimacy with God, this God who pursued her and chose her and spoke to her the same way God is after us. Hearing God involves giving up control of the conversation, it’s being willing to let God say what needs to be said and to let God ask us for something.
Hearing what God is asking of us takes time and openness and using our memory of what we have seen and heard. But as Mary heard today, with God nothing is impossible, even getting through to us in these days before Christmas, people like us with so many distractions, but with a clear voice reaching out to us wanting to free us.