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In our Epistle reading for this Sunday in the Octave of Christmas we hear from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians 4:1-7. There are two special points to underscore. Let’s see the reading:
[Brethren] [T]he heir, as long as he is a child, is no better than a slave, though he is the owner of all the estate; 2 but he is under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. 3 So with us; when we were children, we were slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe. 4 But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. 6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir.
A great deal is packed into this short pericope.
Let’s get something straight from the get-go. You will sometimes hear from the pulpit or Scripture classes that the Aramaic “Abba” is so intimate and childlike a way to address God the Father that it means “Daddy”. This was popularized by the Lutheran scholar Joachim Jeremias, who was also the source of the pernicious notion that “many” could mean “all”, picked up by the fiends who twisted the English liturgical translations which were inflicted on Anglophone Catholic for decades. In the New Testament we have instances of “Abba, Father”, three times: here in Galatians, once in any of the Gospels in Mark 14:36 when the agonized Lord in the garden addresses the Father at the beginning of His Passion (and He would have said “Daddy” then?), and in Romans 8:15, where Paul again uses the analogy of slavery and freedom. If you want to read in depth about the correct rendering of abba, seek out an article by James Barr, whose title says it all, “Abba isn’t Daddy” (Journal of Theological Studies, NS, Vol. 39, Pt 1, April 1988). Barr says:
It’s fair to say that ‘abba’ in Jesus’ time belonged to a familiar or colloquial register of language, as distinct from more formal and ceremonious usage, though it would be unwise, in view of the usage of the Targum, to press this too far. But in any case it was not a childish expression comparable with ‘Daddy’: it was more a solemn, responsible, adult address to a Father.
Another point about this reading. This is the only mention of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Paul, and the reference isn’t by name: “God sent forth his Son, born of a woman” (v 4). This short phrase is important, because it underscores that Jesus had not one, but two natures, divine (from God) and human (from His mother). Moreover, he is not of vague humanity but of a specific woman whom we rightly can call the “Mother of God”. Mary was not the mother of a nature, but of a person, indeed a divine Person, Jesus, the Incarnate Second Person. This was solemnly defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
Whenever I touch on this topic of Mary’s Motherhood of God, I recall something from years ago in a conference given by Joseph Card. Ratzinger. After his address, Ratzinger responded to a question about his differences with fellow German and a major source of today’s chaos in the Church, the late Jesuit Fr. Karl Rahner. Rahner, as I understand him – which is not at all possible, really – tried to force God into the category of an abstraction, a kind of “Existenz-modus”. After Ratzinger explained Rahner’s notion, he said, that, of course, an “existence mode” didn’t need a mother, and “you cannot pray to an Existenz-modus”. As I write, I am keenly aware that we are coming up on the 2nd anniversary of the death of Pope Benedict XVI, on 31 December 2022, New Year’s Eve, and the vigil of the Feast of Mary, Mother of God in the calendar of the Novus Ordo. Perhaps in your goodness you will pray for the repose the soul of that gentle, scholarly, reluctant Successor of Peter in whose wake the Barque has rolled and roiled in increasing turbulence.
From the Epistle, let us pass for a moment to the Gospel from Luke 2:33-40, the account of Joseph and Mary bringing Jesus to the Temple when the Law of Moses required ritual purification. They were ritually impure, not morally impure. The ritual purity laws of the Jews were extremely complex. In a very small nutshell, ritual impurity, which meant that you could not offer sacrifice until undergoing purification, is rooted in contact with death or with the loss of some thing associated with life, such as blood and other fluids. Loss of certain bodily fluids was akin to a kind of death. Moreover, ritual impurity could be passed along by contact with a person in that state, rather like cooties. Hence, after the necessary time required by the Law had passed, the Holy Father went to the Temple for ritual purification, a reintegration in the larger community.
It was during this visit to the Temple that the Holy Family met the Simeon who, inspired by the Holy Spirit, made the prophecy about the Child as a “sign of contradiction” and about Mary soul (psyché) being “pierced” by a “sword”. The Greek for “sword” here is romphaía a long, slightly curved blade used by the Thracians, so wicked and effective that the Roman legions altered their helmets for greater protection. The romphaía is also in the Book of Revelation. In Rev 1:16 it comes forth from “the Son of Man’s (Christ’s) mouth. In Rev 2:12 and 16 the message to Pergamum refers to that same sword. Rev 6:8 says that the rider of the pale horse, Death, would slay a fourth part with hunger, beasts and the romphaía. Rev 19:15 and 21 recapitulate the romphaía issuing from the mouth of the one who is Faithful and True, the Judge, the Word of God, King of Kings and Lord of Lords on a white horse.
Finally, I’ll note in amazing figure of Anna, daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher called “a prophetess”, who had been in the Temple for decades. The Church recognizes her as a saint and her Byzantine Catholic feast day is appropriately 3 February, hard by Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation.
Luke says that Anna was a widow of “about 84 years”, adding that she had been married for seven years. The Greek is ambiguous, however. It is hard to tell if her age was about 84 or she was a widow for about 84 years. I lean to the later, because of that “about” (hos) Hence, if she married at 14 was widowed at 21, and she meets the Holy Family 84 years later… she is 105. Are there any other women in the Bible who were 105? Judith, who was also a widow. It was she who sawed off the head of Holofernes, the Assyrian King Nebuchadnezzar’s general, resulting in an Israelite victory in battle and the conversion by the Assyrian’s second-in-command, Alchior, to belief in the one, true God (Jud 14:10). The last verse of the Book of Judith: “And no one ever again spread terror among the people of Israel in the days of Judith, or for a long time after her death.” Judith is a turning-point figure who exemplifies victory against all odds by being unswerving and faithful in perseverance in God’s will.
God preserved Anna for this moment. Year in and year out, day in and day out, for 84 years. That’s over 30,000 days. Anna recalls Judith, and also embodies the Ps verse 27:4:
One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after;
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord,
and to inquire in his temple.
Who knows what the Lord has in store for us? Anna is a model for our own perseverance in trust in God’s plan.
Of all the possible universes God could have created, He created this one and not some other. He knew every one of us before the creation of the cosmos, and He called us from nothingness into existence in this particular universe at this particular time according to His unfathomable plan. We have a role to play in God’s economy of salvation. We have to trust that we are exactly when and where God wants us to be. We have been born into troubling times. This is our battlefield, not some other theoretically ideal battlefield. It’s ideal for us because it’s ours and this is the one God gave us. The greater the trouble of our days, the greater will be our glory through love, service and fidelity. The harder the task, the more will we be offered the graces in the doing.
We don’t know why exactly we are called into this point in time and place, but we know that God must have a plan for us. If we can accept our state and live it well, and accept the mysterious burdens and challenges that come with living, we are confident that we shall look the Messiah in the face, our selves new born into the happiness of heaven, where there is no weeping or weakness or sorrow and all our great questions will be resolved in the midst of our loved ones and the holy saints and myriad hosts of angels before God’s throne.
St. Anna, daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher. Pray for us.
