The point I am making, I guess, is that Mary played a very significant part in the life of the average Catholic in those days. Much of it would be judged these days as being excessively sentimental or cloyingly pious and even a bit superstitious. At the time it just made sense and was, more than anything else, a particular cultural and historical expression of the instinct which has been there in the Christian story since the very beginnings: that having a place for Mary is an essential dimension of Christianity in its fullness.

Things have changed somewhat since those days, at least for many Catholics in Australia and of course we are not alone in this. After the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s the Church entered into a period of its history where much of what we had been doing for many years – and sometimes hundreds of years - began to come under scrutiny. As a result of that, and possibly in response to what was seen to be an exaggerated Marian piety, devotion to Mary began to diminish and her role in the day to day life of many Catholics began to disappear. At the very best, we might say that for many, Marian devotion was seen to be an optional extra for those who had a particular bent in that direction, and people were prepared to tolerate it, more or less, as long as it was not forced on anyone and as long as it was more private than public.

In recent years this has begun to change again, partly due to the influence of Pope John Paul 11, whose Marian devotion was clearly fundamental to his understanding of the Christian faith. My impression, for example, is that in our primary schools there is a renewed attention being given to Mary. There is once again a focus on the Rosary in October, and on Mary generally in May. The broadening of our Catholic experience in Australia with the arrival of so many Catholics from other cultures has also had its impact as so many of these cultures, in their Catholic expression, are deeply Marian in their approach.

The devotional aspect is one important dimension, but there are two others I would like to mention. One is the influence of Pope John Paul 11, which I have already alluded to, and the other is the renewal in Biblical Scholarship, especially in the past 50 or so years. It is remarkable, for example, to pick up scholarly studies, written by Protestant as well as Catholic authors, which express a high level of agreement as to the central place which Mary plays in the gospel tradition. In the new ecumenical context in which we live, Christians of other traditions are beginning to realize that, to the extent that they have left Mary out of the picture, to that extent they have lost an essential dimension of the Christian story. If you are interested in these things, you might like to get hold of a recent document written by the Anglican and Roman Catholic International Commission. It focuses on the role of Mary in the Christian tradition, and acknowledges that even Catholic beliefs such as the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption are in harmony with the message of the Scriptures. I was present in this room when Dr Charles Sherlock, an Australian Anglican theologian and one of the writers of the document, presented the document at a formal gathering. He told the story of how, as he studied the question of Mary’s role, he gradually came to understand it better. Then, at one stage, he found himself in hospital facing a fairly serious operation. “It occurred to me,” he said, “that perhaps I should ask Mary to pray for me. However as a good Anglican I found myself very uncomfortable with the idea. After reflecting a little more, however, I realized that I didn’t need to ask Mary to pray for me, because I knew that she already was!”  Certainly when I was growing up I never expected to hear other Christians speak of Mary in this way.

All of this is really by way of introduction, because I want to reflect with you this morning on Mary as someone who can lead us into the mystery and spirit of Advent. For some of you my invitation is to reconnect with an aspect of your faith which perhaps was once quite central but which has now become somewhat vague. For others of you my invitation is to allow yourselves to be challenged by what you hear to see more deeply into something which has always been and continues to be important to you. And for others again my invitation is to enter, perhaps for the first time, into the Marian dimension of our Christian and Catholic tradition, and to begin to ask yourselves what this might add to your own experience and understanding of God and God’s ways.

I would like to start then by suggesting that, while in our popular tradition we have tended to focus on Mary in a particular way in the month of May and the month of October, we might also think of the month of December, or more particularly the four weeks of Advent, as a time for a special focus on Mary. This was certainly the suggestion of Pope Paul V1 who wrote a document on Mary in 1974 called Marialis cultus or Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In a sense he was partly responding to a certain eclipse of Mary in the life of the Church which was already noticeable by then. I want to share with you a quote from this document. It is a little long but well worth being aware of:

During Advent there are many liturgical references to Mary besides the Solemnity of December 8, which is a joint celebration of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, of the basic preparation (cf. Is. 11:1, 10) for the coming of the Savior and of the happy beginning of the Church without spot or wrinkle.  Such liturgical references are found especially on the days from December 17 to 24, and more particularly on the Sunday before Christmas, which recalls the ancient prophecies concerning the Virgin Mother and the Messiah and includes readings from the Gospel concerning the imminent birth of Christ and His precursor.

In this way the faithful, living in the liturgy the spirit of Advent, by thinking about the inexpressible love with which the Virgin Mother awaited her Son, are invited to take her as a model and to prepare themselves to meet the Savior who is to come. They must be "vigilant in prayer and joyful in...praise.” We would also remark that the Advent liturgy, by linking the awaiting of the Messiah and the awaiting of the glorious return of Christ with the admirable commemoration of His Mother, presents a happy balance in worship. This balance can be taken as a norm for preventing any tendency (as has happened at times in certain forms of popular piety) to separate devotion to the Blessed Virgin from its necessary point of reference-Christ. It also ensures that this season, as liturgy experts have noted, should be considered as a time particularly suited to devotion to the Mother of the Lord. This is an orientation that we confirm and which we hope to see accepted and followed everywhere.

The key to this passage is I think the suggestion that “by thinking about the inexpressible love with which the Virgin Mother awaited her Son, (we) are invited to take her as a model and to prepare (ourselves) to meet the saviour who is to come.”

I imagine that most of us would have no problem with this suggestion of Pope Paul V1, but it still leaves us with the question of what it means to take what we might call the “Advent Mary” as our model. Do the gospels really offer us much in terms of the way in which Mary awaited the birth of her Son?

Well, I think the answer is “yes”. I would like to spend some time looking then at two passages from the Scriptures which I think can teach us a great deal. The first is from Matthew’s gospel and the second is from Luke’s gospel.

It is really very interesting to think about the significance of the fact that in the earliest gospel we have, that of Mark, there are quite simply no stories at all about the birth of Jesus. If all we had was Mark’s gospel, I doubt if we would be celebrating Christmas at all. He starts with the story of Jesus’ baptism by John and makes no reference to Jesus’ origins, his birth, his parents, or his childhood. It’s as if Mark simply isn’t interested. Similarly his gospel has very little to say about Mary. In fact the only story we have about her doesn’t really put her in a very good light. Let me just show you the one text which mentions Mary, and even then not by name – she is simply called the mother of Jesus.

The crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard about this, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, "He has gone out of his mind." ……..

Then his mother and his brothers and sisters came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you." And he replied, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" And looking at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." (Mk 3: 20, 31-25).

We don’t have time this morning to go into this passage in any detail, but I think we have to recognize that, given that it is the only mention of Mary, it is hardly complimentary. In a sense, this need not worry us. At this early stage of the gospel tradition, the focus is still exclusively on Jesus. Mark is just not interested in telling us about Mary. He is simply taking a story, which both Matthew and Luke will also use, about the way in which the natural family of Jesus were concerned for him, and using it to teach his readers about what true discipleship is all about – namely, doing the will of God.

We have to wait for Matthew’s gospel before we begin to get some reflection on the person of Mary. Matthew has the story of Jesus’ origins – it is from him that we have the account of the visit of the wise men, for example, and the recounting of the massacre of the children – but it is interesting that in Matthew’s story it is really Joseph who is the key figure. He is the one who receives visions and messages from angels, he is the one who makes all the decisions, he is the one who is presented, in you like, as a true disciple who does God’s will.

But Matthew also has another element in his story of the origins of Jesus. He has a genealogy, a list of the ancestors of Jesus. Matthew begins with Abraham, (while Luke, who also has a genealogy will begin with Jesus and work backwards all the way to Adam). Matthew wants to show us that Jesus is a descendant of Abraham, of David, and of all the great heroes of the Jewish tradition. In other words, he is well qualified, genealogically, to be the long-awaited messiah.

The interesting thing about the genealogy, though, is the fact that every so often a woman appears. This is very unusual in Jewish genealogies, and many people have wondered just why any women, and then why these women in particular, appear.

Who are the women? Very briefly they are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheeba, and lastly of course Mary.

Tamar was the daughter-in-law of Judah. To cut a long story short, she was a widow and childless and, in order to conceive, disguised herself as a prostitute, seduced her father-in-law, and bore him twin sons who carried on the line of the Chosen People.

Rahab was also a prostitute but this time not a member of the Chosen People.  She sheltered the spies of Joshua and thus enabled Joshua to win the battle of Jericho and secure the Promised Land for God’s people.

Ruth was a foreigner who married Boaz and bore him a son who was the grandfather of King David.

Bathsheeba was the wife of Uriah, a foreigner who was sent to his death by King David because David had seduced Bathsheeba and she was pregnant with his son, the future King Solomon.

In the case of these four Old Testament women it seems that Matthew has included them because, in one way or another, either through prostitution, seduction or the fact that they were foreigners, these women became instruments of God’s plan and through giving birth to their children were key figures in the ongoing story of the Chosen People, a story which would culminate in yet another unusual birth, the birth of Jesus. They were  also women who in one way or another showed remarkable courage in allowing God to work through them in strange and unexpected ways. Matthew is wanting to suggest that Mary, like the women before her, was a willing, active and courageous instrument ready to allow God to work in her life to bring his plan to fulfillment. In this sense Matthew is also hinting that Mary, like Joseph, is a true disciple, because she too does the will of God.

This insight of Matthew’s, not greatly developed in his gospel, finds a much more powerful expression in Luke’s story of the origins of Jesus. In particular, from our point of view, the role of Mary in the events of our salvation is presented very powerfully in the Annunciation story. I would like to spend a little time on that story now.

You all have a copy of the text in front of you – you might like to follow it as we move through it.

The story starts in verse 26 of chapter one with a reference to what has gone before. “In the sixth month” means in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy. Luke wants us to read the story of the annunciation to Mary in the light of the story he has just told us of the annunciation to Zechariah. It’s almost as if Luke is saying to us: You think the story of Zechariah is pretty wonderful – just have a listen to the story of Mary!

So, in the story, the angel is sent by God to Nazareth to a virgin, whose name is Mary, and who is already betrothed in marriage to a man named Joseph. Luke tells us that when the angel greeted Mary, she was greatly troubled. Some translations would even use the word “terrified”. I suppose you would be if an angel arrived at the front door unannounced! But Luke tells us that it was the nature of the greeting which really disturbed Mary. What did the angel say? “Rejoice, most highly favoured one. The Lord is with you.” We are more used to the translation “Hail Mary full of grace. The Lord is with you.” Why would this greeting be so disturbing? It is really in the use of the word “rejoice” and in the use of the word which we translate as highly favoured one,” but which comes from the Greek root of a word that gives us the word “grace”. The combination of these two ideas suggests that in fact the angel is already letting Mary know that the long awaited coming of the messiah is now being announced to her – that she, in other words, is about to be caught up in something that her people have waited for and longed for for centuries. She is frightened by the implications of this – it is too much for her – she is a simple Jewish girl. It is almost as if she is saying “No, please just leave me alone. I don’t want to hear this.”

The angel goes on to encourage her not to be afraid. How often will we hear those words repeated in the gospel tradition? But Mary is not reassured. Whatever else the angel might be he is not a good psychologist. “Do not be afraid” he says. “You are about to fall pregnant.” This is not calculated to make Mary feel any better. And of course the angel goes on to explain to Mary just who her child will be – the Son of the Most High. In response to this, Mary becomes confused. “How can this be,” she asks “for I am a virgin?”

This is a strange question. After all, Mary is engaged to be married. In the Jewish culture of the times in particular, for a girl to become engaged, eventually marry and have children, was seen as a sign of God’s blessing. Why was Mary so unsure?

Some people have suggested that it was because Mary had taken a private vow of virginity.  This seems unlikely given the Jewish culture of the time. What is more likely, according to some scholars, is that although Mary was betrothed to Joseph there was a growing intuition within her that God was asking something different of her. She perhaps could not put words on this, or clarify it for herself, but she was in a state of uncertainty, and coming to believe that God was asking something of her that may have required her to remain a virgin. The message of the angel, that she was to have a child, could only have left her confused. Had she completely misunderstood God’s plan for her? Had she got it all wrong?

The angel goes on to explain to her that the Holy Spirit would come upon her and that the power of the Most High would cover her with its shadow – in other words, that what he had said in his opening greeting – the Lord is with you – was no mere conventional greeting but the plain and simple truth.

When Mary allowed herself to hear and believe those words, she found a new sense of peace and was finally able to say, “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word.”

And, as the traditional Angelus prayer tells us, because Mary spoke those words, “the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

This story of the Annunciation to Mary of the Lord’s birth, while it is first and foremost a story about the divine origins of Jesus, is also, in the way Luke tells it, a story about Mary and about her journey of faith. It is, I believe, a story which Luke uses to teach us not just about Mary’s faith, but about what the experience of faith is like in our own lives.

Pope Paul V1 invited us to think about the inexpressible love with which the Virgin Mother awaited her Son, and to take her as a model as we prepare to meet the Savior who is to come. So what does Mary show us?

First of all, that it is OK to be frightened when God breaks into our lives in ways we do not expect. We do not find in Mary, as she is presented in the Gospel tradition, a woman who exists in a state of total serenity, confidence and peace. We find a woman, a person, who struggles with God’s call and God’s plan for her. We see someone who doesn’t always understand. Luke reminds us of this, doesn’t he, when he tells us the story of Jesus being lost when he was twelve years old. When Mary and Joseph eventually find him in the Temple and he explains that he is about his Father’s business, Luke tells us that neither Joseph nor Mary understood what he was talking about. Jesus was a mystery to them – we shouldn’t be surprised if he is a mystery to us.

In this regard, I think it is important to say, and this is true of us in a way that it wasn’t true of Mary, that we often try to construct our lives without God playing a central or important part. We plan our futures and live our days as if God were absent or out of the equation. But God is always there, always at the centre of our lives, even when we don’t recognize or acknowledge his presence, and it is precisely for this reason – that we have a certain forgetfulness of God – that when God does break into our lives, our reaction will often be one of surprise and fear. We had perhaps forgotten about God but God hasn’t forgotten about us. And our forgetfulness of him does not discourage him or prevent him from still inviting us to be a part of his unfolding plan for his people.

In the annunciation story Mary moves from fear to confusion. As it becomes clearer to her just what it is God is asking of her, she finds herself asking how this can possibly be. This doesn’t fit in with what she had come to understand or believe God was asking of her. This does not fit in with the way she has planned or imagined her life. There seem to be obstacles which make it impossible for what God is asking of her to actually happen.

Like Mary, we too can be confused as well as fearful as God’s plan unfolds in our lives. A couple may be faced with an unplanned pregnancy or the debilitating illness of a child, a partner or a parent. Something may happen which means that we must uproot ourselves and begin a whole new life in a new place far from people we know. All kinds of things may happen to us which do not fit in with our carefully constructed plans. And so we wonder how we are going to manage. Surely God can’t be asking this of us! And yet God often does ask things of us for which we feel unprepared or ill-equipped. As Advent people, as “Annunciation” people we might say, we need to know that there will be times when we must live with doubt and confusion.

How did Mary live with this reality? She was only able to because she allowed herself to hear and believe the words of the angel, which were of course the assurance of God, that the Holy Spirit would be with her and that the power of the Most High would cover her with its shadow. She allowed herself, in other words, to trust – not in herself, not in her own strength, not in her special gifts or capacities – but in the presence of God.

In the end, I think this is the special gift that Mary’s example offers us at Advent: that we do not need to be afraid because God’s Spirit is with us and God’s power hovers over us – and therefore we can trust. Advent people are people who trust – not in themselves but in God.