Mary was so much more than what we might first think, she was an amazing young woman of faith and courage.  Women in Mary’s day and culture didn’t speak up for themselves yet here she responds to God’s call upon her with “here I am” echoing the responses of great people and prophets before her – Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah.  She too felt inadequate and ill equipped but trusting God implicitly, simply said yes with her life and her body.  This young Jewish girl from a small rural community, a person of no great importance or status, with no power or privilege is chosen by God to bear God’s Son.  The One who the Hebrew people had been waiting for, for centuries – with hope for freedom and for peace.

Both John and Mary were such ordinary people.  They had no wealth, status or power but each had a deep faith in their hearts and an openness  to the message of God.  Neither questioned nor doubted, even when faced with situations that seemed impossible or inexplicable.  They heard God in their hearts and they believed.  May we too grasp the mystery of the incarnation with the faith of the heart. For the mind alone can never penetrate these things. It is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing. We have to stand before God’s secret with reverent awe and experience in our own lives, this miracle of the incarnation.

We are told that the righteous will be blessed for having fed the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked and visiting the sick and the imprisoned. We are told they have done all these things to Jesus. The King then condemns the goats on his left side for having done none of these things for Jesus.
Both the sheep and the goats have no idea what it is going on. They are clueless about when they did or didn’t do any of these things to Jesus.

Loving Creator God,
We rejoice in the beauty of this ancient land and her waters.
We marvel at the awesome way they have been formed.
We give thanks for her First Nations Peoples,
their stories of creation sung by countless Ancestors.

Because that is what we can hold onto, what matters … today and every day … having hope in something greater than ourselves.  It is what counter balances the brokenness and the suffering of human life – hope in Christ is what we aspire to, it is where we are destined.

God knows us and loves us in a deep and intimate way.  Through Christ, we are saved and we are told that we will be like him, like brothers and sisters; we will follow the path he has taken. It is like running in a race where it doesn’t matter whether you are coming last or how tough the going is, in the end you will always win.  The final outcome is assured.  In our pilgrim lives, not everything has been revealed yet but we are assured of what lies ahead, because we too, are God’s children.

Jesus didn’t just know the law, as the Messiah, he embodied it, he was the law.  The Pharisees knew that the Messiah was to come from the house of David, so would be a son of David, but they expected a human king, a powerful warrior that would free the people from oppression by foreign powers.  They did not expect the Messiah to be God himself standing before them in the human person of Jesus.  This did not enter their realm of thinking or understanding; they were not open to who Jesus was or to his message.  As I already mentioned, Jesus embodied the law so his focus was on actions, on living God’s truth, as opposed to just words.  The commandments were intended to teach people how to live life well rather than to be used for the purposes of judgement, self-promotion or to impose control on the lives of others.  Jesus had not come to oppose the law of the prophets but to uphold and fulfil them, to interpret them in ways that make them meaningful based on God’s truth not human world views.