This Sunday is the 4th Sunday of Advent and our readings are:
2 SM 7:1-5, 8B-12, 14A, 16
ROM 16:25-27
LK 1:26-38
God asks David "Should you be the one to build me a house? Come now, boy king. You're too big for your britches. You want to make a house? I will tell you about making a house." God, not David, is in charge.
Saint Paul summarizes and concludes his letter to the Romans. He emphasizes that God's plans were only incompletely revealed until now. Several phrases make this passage right for the climax of Advent. It's not about the birth of the infant Jesus, but about the unveiling of God's plan for human salvation.
Prophets revealed it first, but only to the Jews and only incompletely. Now it is revealed to all the Gentiles as they hear the gospel. For this is God to be glorified. This is joyful, but not sentimental. This is Christocentric, but not "Christmassy."
Saint Luke wrote for an audience quite different from those of Mark and Matthew, different, too, from the Thessalonians and many other recipients of Paul's letters. Luke's readers lived a generation or more later than the apostles, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E., and outside the Holy Land. They had never been Jews. They were cosmopolitan, middle-class and Gentile, living in a skeptical society, yet attracted to a religion with long historic Jewish roots. But that new religion only came to its fulfillment by reaching out to all humankind. To tell that story, to ground his audience in their adopted religious heritage, and to keep them focused on the religion's mission, Luke needed to tell the story of Jesus anew in this gospel, and needed a second book, the Acts of the Apostles.
I know that doing good things for God is important, but at times it’s just as valid to sit back and reflect on what good things God has done for us, even before we started doing good things for God. Today’s three readings zero in on that theology.
Reflect on these three examples of what God’s work in the life of these ordinary people accomplished! Mary shows us HOW to be believers in God and allow him to work in our lives.
How is the Lord with you this season?
How is the Lord with your family?
Join us Thursday @ 7:00PM in Adoration of our risen Lord, then Bible Study following!
THE DUDE ABIDES Jn 15:4
For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not want to understand, no explanation is possible.
Jim Krieger
Lay Mystic
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