Identity, Destiny, and Connectivity
Fourth Sunday of Advent Scripture Readings
As we meditate on the gospel today, I’d like to concentrate on three critical aspects of the scene that’s before us: Mary, already pregnant with her first-born son, Jesus, visits her relative, Elizabeth, the mother of a boy named John who will grow up to be known as the Baptist. The three aspects of the story we’ll be looking at are: identity, destiny, and connectivity.
It goes without saying that each of the characters we encounter today has a unique and very special identity. Mary, the pregnant young girl from Nazareth in Galilee, had come all the way to the hill country of Judea to see her relative. She knew her pregnancy was miraculous since she hadn’t had relations with her husband. Rather, in faith, she had chosen to surrender herself entirely to the will of God. Her willingness to face the unknown continued to show itself in her taking the long journey to Judea while pregnant—with or without her husband, Joseph.
It was Elizabeth whom Mary came to see, a much older lady whose pregnancy was also miraculous because she was well beyond child-bearing age. She was a welcoming woman, but more than that, she was a deeply spiritually intuitive woman, very aware that the child within her was special and that Mary was someone very special who had come to her bearing a very special child.
The unborn infant John, named by the message of an angel, possessed the same kind of spiritual intuition as his mother. He reacted to the presence of Mary and her unborn child by stirring in the womb. Even before emerging into the light, John was sensitive to the presence of God in the world and the scene before him.
Finally, the unborn child, Jesus, also named by an angel, rests easy in his mother’s womb. His name, in Hebrew, Yehoshua’, means Yahweh Saves. He’s been called the Son of the Most High, and Elizabeth and her child have acknowledged him as their Lord.
Each of them has his or her own unique identity bestowed upon them by no choice of their own. Each of them, although limited by their genetics, time, and space, possesses a broad spectrum of possible directions their lives could take. Yet, within those identities, each holds a kernel of destiny.
Jesus’s destiny is spelled out in his name, for through him, Yahweh comes to save his people. As Son of the Most High, he is destined to take his rightful place as the anointed king in the line of David. He is the Messiah, the Christ. He is to be given the throne of his father, David, and this throne—the cross—was prepared for him from all eternity as the prophets had foretold. He is destined to receive the honor and glory and power of his Heavenly Father.
Mary’s destiny was to be the living temple of the divine Presence, the mother of the Messiah. She was to conceive Yahweh God and to be the “God-Bearer,” the Theotokos. It was her destiny to bear God incarnate to Elizabeth, to John, and to the world. She was to receive the titles, Blessed among women, and Mother of God.
Elizabeth’s destiny was to be the receiver of the Word of God. She was to be among the first to experience and to recognize the divine Presence in human form and to acknowledge the Christ-bearer, his mother, Mary.
John was destined to become the Baptist, and not only to recognize the divine Presence from his mother’s womb but also to take on the role of precursor and herald of the Messiah. The gift of prophesy which infused his identity also became his destiny as the greatest of the prophets who foretold the coming of the Christ.
In each person’s case, they wouldn’t have been able to fulfill their destinies without the others. Their destinies were interconnected and interdependent. As their identities were incomplete without their destinies, so their destinies would have been incomplete without their connections to one another and to God.
As we’re well aware, the gospels aren’t simply about the people we find in their narratives. The gospels are prophetic writings and, as such, their meanings and purpose continually unfold over time. Therefore, they tell us something about ourselves, too. In this case, they invite us to reflect on our own identities, destinies, and connections.
Like all created things, our identities are defined more by our limitations than by our strengths. Just as the disciples recognized the risen Jesus by his wounds, our spiritual selves will be forever recognized by our woundedness. Take away everything we are not and what’s left is who we are. Like Mary, Elizabeth, John, and Jesus, our identities are meaningless without our destinies. Each of us, based on what remains when everything else is taken away, has a destiny that we can choose to fulfill or not. God won’t force us to be the people we had the capacity and the destiny to become. But we can, like Mary, surrender our wills to God’s. Our highest calling, of course, is to bring the love of God into the world as Elizabeth, John, Mary, and Jesus did. They fulfilled their destinies willingly, each in his or her own unique way.
How, then, are we to actualize the potential inherent in each of our identities and thereby fulfill our destinies? Our self-will isn’t enough. We can’t do it alone. We require connections—a connection to God, certainly, but also connections to one another as well. We’re destined to serve as members of the Body of Christ, and members of the same body have a shared destiny. Each of us has a part to play, as God-bearers, or receivers, as heralds of God’s presence, or embodiments of God’s love.
Like Mary and Jesus, Elizabeth and John, our identities determine our destinies, and our destinies are fulfilled in and through our connections. We rejoice because all destinies came together at the nativity of the Messiah, the Christ, our Lord and God, and we acknowledge that they continue to unfold in the individual destinies of each one of us, connected as we are to God and to one another in the Body of Christ we call the Church.
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