Our sense of expectation intensifies as we begin the last week before the Great Day. The Church puts on our lips today the invocation O Wisdom from the mouth of the Most High! addressed to our awaited Messiah. Matthew’s long genealogy of Jesus shows how the divine Wisdom can give form to a history of salvation out of the mess that we humans always manage to make of our individual and collective lives.
The birth of Jesus, the fruit of no less than 42 generations, is what confers lasting meaning on everything that has gone on before. It is to this birth that the all-wise God had from the outset been directing the course of world history, interweaving his own secret design into an often chaotic pattern. The beauty of the whole could be seen only after its completion.
But let us not consider that genealogy from afar, as if we were mere spectators. We should strive to find our own unique place within it. The German poet Angelus Silesius says rather boldly:
What good to me, O Gabriel, that you greet Mary
Unless you bring me, too, that Word extraordinary?
Let us, then, prepare our souls and lives
ardently so that we, too, like our Blessed Mother, can conceive and give birth
to Jesus into this tortured world of ours, so desperate for a Savior.
Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Reflection by Father Simeon.
