advent mystery
embracing (not extinguishing) the unknown
We Westerners have a hard time with mystery. “Mystery” is a category of fiction in which a problem is presented at the beginning of the story—a dead body is discovered, for example—and everything from there is devoted to solving it. In our minds, mystery is a question to be answered, a puzzle to be completed. We don’t like the hanging chad of the unknown.
Fr. Anthony Ugolnik sums up this tendency as it relates to faith:
We [Christians in the West] confess to doctrines profoundly mysterious by their nature—that a man should be God, that one God should be at the same time three persons, that we of corruptible flesh should also be temples of the living God. So we believe, but so we cannot comfortably think. For as “thoughts,” these are in essence mystery.
Mystery and sacrament go hand in hand in the Christian faith. In Greek, they’re the same word! In order to have a sacramental approach to our spirituality, we have to get cozy with mystery.
This week begins the season of Advent, the four weeks leading up to the feast of Christmas. At this time, we often remember the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would bear the Messiah. In this post, I’d like to reflect briefly on Mary’s response to the angel in Luke 1 and allow her to teach us what it means to embrace the unknown.
full of grace
“Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” (v.28). This encapsulates the angel’s entire announcement. Mary is the “favored one.” The root of the Greek word here is “grace”—she is the graced one, the one on whom the light of God’s grace has shone in a special way. This is where the famous “Hail Mary” prayer comes from; Mary is “full of grace,” because God has poured it out upon her.
She is full of grace because “the Lord is with you!” This echoes the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Immanuel means, “God with us.” The angel is saying to the virgin Mary, “God is with you! You are the chosen home of God himself.”
Mary doesn’t understand this and is “greatly troubled.” Mystery is troubling. She knows well that God can come in either judgment or blessing. God’s existence and presence is not an abstract idea to be debated in an ivory tower. It is the living, pulsating fact behind everything in this universe: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Mary knows that God is there, but she also knows that she is not God. That on her own, she is undeserving. That, before the Lord, “who could stand"?” (Psalm 130:3).
what can contain God?
When King Solomon dedicated the temple in Jerusalem, he prayed a prayer of blessing over it, recorded for us in 1 Kings 8:27: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” The Jerusalem temple was a wonder of the ancient world, covered in gold, grand and glorious, a fitting place for God to meet with his people. But Solomon was saying, “this house isn’t grand enough, big enough, glorious enough to really contain God. NOTHING on earth can really contain God.”
Nothing on earth can really contain God—except the Virgin Mary. Col. 1:19 says that “all the fullness of God” dwelt in Christ Jesus. And Christ Jesus dwelt bodily for 9 months in Mary’s womb.
The golden temple wasn’t big enough for God. But the mystery of the incarnation is that God humbled himself. Made himself small. Minuscule. Microscopic. All the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Jesus who was pleased to dwell as a zygote in the womb of an illiterate teenage girl in the backwoods village of Nazareth.
receiving the mystery
There are theological formulas and doctrinal implications of this truth. But what is most important is not the rigor of the recipe, but the stunning reality it represents.
The mystery of Advent should make us stand in awe of the humility and glory of a God who willingly makes himself small so that He can show us His amazing grace. Are we willing to put off our Western desire to comprehend and control in order to receive it? Can we, in this season, let ourselves be caught up in this tiniest and most glorious, wondrous, world-altering miracle?
Can we receive the mystery like Mary did?
In our world of hurry, we want to nail down mystery, get the bottom line from a given Scripture or sermon, and get on with “real life” things like deadlines and decision-making. We don’t receive mystery because we simply don’t have time for it.
But when Heaven entered the earth of Mother Mary’s womb, our fathers and mothers in the faith broke into song and poetry. Infinite beauty can’t be honored without an attempt to offer whatever art we can muster in response.
In Canto 33 of Dante’s Paradiso, he wrote,
Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,
Humble and high beyond all other creature
Mary is the only woman in history who could rightly be called “daughter of thy Son.” A few centuries later, John Donne took the idea further:
Ere by the spheres time was created thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother;
Whom thou conceivest, conceived; yea, thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room
Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.
Not only is Mary, “daughter of thy Son”; she is “thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother.” Christ Jesus, through whom all things were made, received His flesh from His mother. Borne by her, born of her, our God humbled Himself to be “made” by His own creature.
C.S. Lewis might paraphrase the last line of Donne’s poem, “Some things are larger on the inside than on the outside.”
As strict doctrinal statements, perhaps these phrases break down. As powerful touchstones for reflection on the wonder of Advent, I don’t know any better. Mystery merits meditation. I hope you give yourself the space for it this season.
Yes it is! 😊
I actually saw this fresco of the Virgin Mary in the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome!