The Road to Joy: Sunday Reflection

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This morning’s Gospel reading is Luke 1:39–45:

 Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”

Behold, I come to do Your will.

Earlier this week, while indulging a new and completely inexplicable addiction to YouTube videos (pray for me), I happened to run across one that gave thumbnail explanations of the differences and similarities between Christian ecclesial communities. I braced myself for what the video would have to say about Catholics, but as it happens, the description was fair and straightforward. (The tone was equally respectful of all.) 

The video explained that Catholics believe that salvation is through faith in Christ and participation in the life of the church Christ founded. Not every ecclesial community believes that, of course, and members of each have their own honest approaches. However, the video did use one critical word in describing this: cooperation. Catholics believe that Christ founded the Church as a means for all to come to salvation, and all must cooperate within it to allow for Christ’s salvation.

Now, cooperation is not just a Catholic belief, although the form of cooperation may differ. It’s not much different in action than what our ecclesial siblings believe. They may believe that we have to cooperate in faith, or cooperate through the Scriptures, in order to receive grace and salvation. The common key to salvation in Christianity is cooperation through the Holy Spirit to be formed to enter the Trinitarian life, in the forms that Christians of different sects believe is effective.

In today’s Gospel, we have two of the most beautiful examples of cooperation with the will of the Lord in all of our Scriptures, and they tie together into a community of their own. Elizabeth had been a childless woman past the age of bearing children, who became pregnant through the intervention of the Holy Spirit — via the cooperation of Elizabeth and Zechariah. Zechariah’s cooperation was not complete, and as a consequence he was struck mute until the birth of John the Baptist, only recovering his voice in time to insist that the child be named as the angel of God had required. 

The parallel to this comes from Genesis, when Abraham’s wife Sarah becomes pregnant late in life with Isaac. Sarah is the one who laughs off the promise, only to become faithful later in cooperating with the Holy Spirit. Through Sarah, the Lord’s promise to Abraham to become a father of nations comes to pass, because Abraham cooperates with His will on several occasions — most famously when the Lord calls on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

Mary’s cooperation, on the other hand, is unparalleled. Her faith in the Lord is unconditional. She allows herself to conceive Jesus through the Holy Spirit; Joseph has a crisis of faith that he has to overcome, but Mary’s cooperation is immediate and complete. At great social and even physical risk for an unmarried teen woman, Mary places her complete trust in the Lord that He will work great things through her and that her faith will be vindicated in the end. 

That sounds grave and frightening — and no doubt it was. However, today’s passage reflects something else entirely: joy. The two women who have given themselves completely to the Lord — and whose sons will sacrifice their own lives in His service — receive each other with delight and joy. This does not come just from their familial ties, but because they recognize in each other the profound commitment to the Lord that each has made. 

That recognition makes them even closer in relation, because as we commit ourselves to cooperation in His will, the closer we come to Him. The closer we come to Him, the closer we come to each other in joy. The infant leaps in Elizabeth’s womb for the same reason; the two babies will grow to cooperate to their deaths in service to the Lord and to each other, even more closely than we see in this Gospel foreshadowing of their overlapping ministries. 

In our second reading today, Paul writes to the Hebrews about the necessity of cooperation to achieve unity and salvation through Jesus. The Lord does not want empty sacrifices, nor did He offer empty sacrifices through Christ to us. God wants us to come closer to Him by cooperating in His will rather than remaining obstinately indifferent to it:

When Christ came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; in holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight. Then I said, ‘As is written of me in the scroll, behold, I come to do your will, O God.’”

Behold, I come to do Your will. Mary famously responds to the angel in the Annunciation with a similar declaration: “Behold, I am a handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to Your word.” Mary didn’t balk over her age or social status; she loved the Lord and trusted Him enough to fully cooperate without concern over her own ambitions and desires. And in doing so, she experiences the true joy of being on the road to salvation.

Advent calls us to that joy as well, in anticipation of what will come. Do we trust and love the Lord to cooperate fully with His will? Will we allow ourselves the joy to serve Him and allow Him to be born into our hearts anew? The time has almost arrived …

Previous reflections on these readings:

The front page image is “Madonna and Child with St. Elizabeth, the Infant St. John the Baptist, and St. Catherine” by Paolo Veronese, c.1565-70. On display at the Timken Museum of Art. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.