Zechariah 2:14-17 OR Revelation 11:19a & 12:1-6a, 10ab; Luke 1:26-38 OR 39-47

All healthy and human activity and meaning grounded in healthy, human reality.  Religion, too, must be solidly engaged in healthy, human life or it becomes silly, superstitious and magical – unworthy of intelligent believers.  Even the Catholic festivals which stem from our liturgical piety must stand up to the healthy and human critique of the Gospel message.  Remember, Culture incarnates the Gospel and the Gospel critiques the Culture.  This is very important because an ever-increasing number of intelligent and thoughtful people are finding religious practice to be less and less relevant to modern life.  It is up to believers to be healthy, intelligent, and human in order to demonstrate the profound meaning and validity of religious faith!

While Zechariah’s prophetic book spans a brief period of only a couple of years (520-518 BC), his prophetic activity may have spanned as much as 30 years (until about 490 BC).  His work exhorted the first and second generations of freed Jews of the Babylonian Captivity to take advantage of the blessings and resources which the Persian Emperor Cyrus had bestowed upon them by God’s grace.  The former captives were the descendants of those who had been conquered and forced to Mesopotamia (some by the Assyrians in 732 BC, more in 598 BC and still more in 587/6 BC by the Babylonian Emperor Nebuchadnezzar II).  But the youngest of them had been born and raised in captivity, and were relatively at home and comfortable in it.  They had resisted the re-migration to the Holy Land in attitude if not overtly in action.  And, there were still some Jews back in Palestine whose ancestors had avoided captivity and in whom there was some fairly intense animosity towards those returning from Babylon.  Zechariah advocated a genuine reconciliation, a rebuilding, and a religious renewal as a combined sign that God dwelt again in his Holy Land and among his re-united Chosen People.  Zechariah appreciated the insight that it was the believing Jews’ behaviors which gave witness to God’s power and love to others.  He preached profound repentance, conversion, and personal change!  This endeavor was not merely to bolster Jewish morale; it was an invitation to the whole world, even to non-Jews to witness and appreciate the very different God of Israel, a God who changed minds and hearts.  It was a divinely ordained restoration of the Jerusalem Temple and God’s presence therein.  Centuries later from a Christian perspective this passage would be reinterpreted as a prophetic foreshadowing of the divine mystery Christians know as the Mystery of the Incarnation, i.e., God’s Word Made Flesh.

An alternative first lesson is found in the three passages from the Book of the  Revelation of John (Aka the Apocalypse of John) woven for this liturgical feast by the lectionary into one continuous text.  In this the metaphorical images of an “ark” (as in “Ark of the Covenant”) in God’s temple in Heaven and the womb of the woman clothed with the sun are both appreciated as vessels or containers on or in which God’s real presence is located.  Both are visionary affirmations of the powerful reality and nearness of God.  The other “signs” that decorate the visionary scene point to God’s glory and power over against the reality of evil and sinfulness which God’s real presence challenges and always overcomes.  The dynamic and apocalyptic clatter of the dragon sweeping away the stars in the sky, the birth of the child, and God’s saving action for both newborn male child and mother, all demonstrate the vast superiority and victory of God’s will, power and grace over all powers of evil in the universe.  This was originally a Gospel message of hope (in apocalyptic terms) for 1st Century Christians faced with immanent persecution and physical destruction.  There is hope in our 21st Christian Century found in those verses, too, but without the apocalyptic attitude, i.e., without vindictive terror against the forces of evil.  Our world is as messy for us in our modern situations as it was for those late 1st Century Christians in Asia Minor.  But we live in relative peace and security, so our interpretation of these visions must be somewhat different than that of the ancients.  We understand this text in intelligent, poetical, and modern terms.  We must be peaceful and confident in the blessings of God in our 21st Christian Century times and places.

The two gospel texts for today’s feast day are two parts of Luke’s Incarnation story.  The Church’s pious tradition has labeled them The Annunciation and The Visitation.  Luke included details from the oral Gospel lore of his day by which to provide visual images of the Infancy Narrative.  These have been used by Christian artists through the ages so that believers might more effectively appreciate the mysterious miracle of the presence of Christ among us.  The more important point, though, is indeed the theological one, that is that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us! The mysterious and invisible God has intervened in the physical universe on human terms and scale to save humanity from the very evils which blind us to the blessedness of Creation and of God’s universal and unfailing love.  God is indeed with us!  We can know God profoundly, not merely at a distance!  These Gospel narratives help us visualize God’s Presence in gradual, human images.

These passages are chosen for the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in order to provide some visual imagery for the Incarnation Mystery while imagining the setting the Gospel message encountered in Mezo-America in the very early 16th Century.  While the Conquistadors had visited a forceful and painful destruction on the sophisticated native civilizations which they encountered, the Gospel message brought along by the missionary Friars competed against some rather harsh native religious beliefs, expressed by images of dragons and other celestial powers.  The native peoples had already perceived the reality of the divine mystery in their own terms.  The Christian Gospel provided new and indeed more profoundly loving images for their religious consideration.  These were embraced all the more once the story spread of the appearances of Mary Theotokos to (Saint) Juan Diego at Tepeyac beginning on December 9th 1531.  Much controversy about the historicity of the apparitions and even about Juan Diego himself has arisen and endured over the centuries.  The controversy has tended to be among scholars trying to measure the historical details surrounding, or absent from, the reports of the apparitions.  But, the popular acceptance of the apparitions has been tremendously effective at conveying healthy and balanced aspects of the Christian Gospel, especially in making that Gospel deeply integral to the Meso-American social and religious cultures.  So, this feast day, with its religious images, art, and customs, can be a forceful witness to the powerful, real, and effective presence of the loving and wise God proclaimed by the Gospel of Christ.  Since a huge portion of the 21st Century Catholic population traces it’s religious cultural roots through the ongoing Spanish missionary efforts beginning in the late 15th Century, this feast day rightly enjoys an important place on the liturgical calendar among the feasts of the Church in the all the Americas and the Philippines.