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Live
Letters Fourth Sunday of
Advent Romans 16:25-27 |
The Catholic Telegraph
December 17, 1999"Glory be to God!" That’s the bottom line of our live letter for this fourth Sunday of Advent. It represents the response of the Church, expressed in the words of St. Paul, to the announcement that is made to Mary in the gospel reading. She would become a mother through a unique intervention of the Holy Spirit and her child would be the Son of the Most High who would rule over a kingdom that would have no end.
This apostolic reading is closely packed and difficult to grasp, like much of St. Paul’s writing, especially his letter to the Romans. One gets the impression sometimes that Paul wanted to say more than ordinary modes of human communication could bear. The result is a kind of writing whose understanding requires careful effort, line by line and word by word. Consequently, we have to go through it slowly and reflectively if we are going to be able to see what it means for us.
To begin, we need to say something about "mystery." "Mystery" is an important word for St. Paul. It occurs more than twenty times in the Pauline letters.
In our ordinary usage, "mystery" is a secret or a riddle to which no answer has yet been found, something whose significance is hidden. "I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me."
In St. Paul’s usage, "mystery" means God’s plan for the world that is in the process of being executed, and, in the process of being brought to fulfillment is also being revealed. It is the disclosure of God’s intentions for the world, hidden up to a certain point but now becoming a kind of open secret. It is what God had in mind from the beginning and what becomes known through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. It is the plan that will unfold in the ministry of Jesus, but which will continue to be implemented until the world’s final reunion with God at the end of time. It is the manifestation of the secret of the world, of the world that is now and of the world that is to be.
Now let’s paraphrase our text. It comes at the very end of the Letter to the Romans and constitutes a kind of summary and final prayer of praise. "I have preached the gospel to you," Paul says, "the gospel that Jesus preached, the gospel that is about Jesus. What I have taught you constitutes the mystery, the plan of God that is now becoming known. It’s a plan that began to be revealed through the prophets, but which is now being fully manifested in God’s own time. The plan calls for all of human kind, Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Romans, and everybody else to be made one through their acceptance of Christ in faith. This plan of God’s offers strength and fullness to your lives. It’s a plan that only the wisdom of God could conceive. Glory be to God!"
Over the past weeks the Church’s liturgical readings have been teaching us about the second coming of Christ in glory, the final stage of God’s plan for His world. At Christmas, the Church celebrates the initiation of that final stage, the birth of Christ Who would unite everything in Himself and present it to His heavenly Father at the appointed time. From that moment on the final fulfillment begins to take shape. The birth of Christ is the beginning of the end.
The mystery of Christ, God’s plan to save a sinful world and give it everlasting significance includes us. All too often we tend to cast our lives in dimensions that are too small. We are busy with our responsibilities to our family and our work. We are concerned about our health or our economic situation. We try to be faithful to God in our behavior by avoiding sin. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with any of that, but it doesn’t do God’s plan full justice.
Sometimes we are able to look a little bit beyond ourselves by using our time and our resources for the benefit of others. We may even become active in the life of our parish. That’s a step in the right direction.
But most of the time we find that we and our own interests, personal or local, occupy center stage. We forget that we are participants in a larger drama. Our life is not just an individual, private occurrence in the thousands of years of the world’s history. Our life is part of the mystery of Christ. It’s a carefully crafted episode in God’s plan to extend the life and work of Jesus through all places and all times. When God became a human being at that moment of the annunciation to Mary, He gave a whole new dimension to the life of each one of us. We have a different significance than we would otherwise have had. Each of us is precious, each of us is important because we share the life of Christ, because we share Christ’s mission to bring the world back to God. Christmas isn’t just about Jesus. It’s about us, too. It’s about us now and it’s about us in the final kingdom of God.
Glory be to God, indeed.
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Conversation Questions:
How does my life contribute to fulfilling the mystery of Christ?
Who is the central character in the drama of my life?
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