Posts Tagged ‘Hebrews 10:5-10’

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Micah 5: 2-4; Psalm 80: 1-7; Hebrews 10: 5-10; Luke 1: 39-49

Consider the stars of this Sunday’s Gospel drama.  One is an adolescent girl, probably no more than thirteen or fourteen, a member of a religious culture that taught her to look for the coming of the Messiah, the one who would liberate her people.  But she never assumed she would be the instrument for his entry into the world, or that through her young body God would be formed in human flesh.  Nor did she ever imagine that she would be invited to cooperate with God in this magnificent event, or to act without knowing the consequences of her cooperation.  To do so meant breaking all the rules of the Jewish religious code, of bringing scandal on her family, and putting her life on the line because she lived in a society that stoned to death unwed mothers.  Consider her cousin Elizabeth, a childless woman long past her childbearing years, an object of pity and scorn in her community where sons were one’s “eternal life.”  And yet in old age and against biological possibility, God answered her prayer for a son and she gave birth to the last of the biblical prophets.  Not just a son, that would have been marvelous in itself, but someone set apart by God to play a leading role in the salvation drama, to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. Read More