"It is the Small Things"

Fourth Sunday of Advent

    Galadriel asks, “Mithrandir, why the halfling?”  “I do not know,” Gandalf replies.  “Saruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check.  But that is not what I have found.  I found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay.”  In the movie, “The Hobbit,” this is the exchange between Lady Galadriel, an Elven queen, and Gandalf, known to the Elves as Mithrandir, who is a wizard.  They know that a great, evil being, Sauron, is active again.  And yet, Gandalf seems very focused on Bilbo, who is a Hobbit, a halfling, who only begrudgingly acquiesced to Gandalf’s request and went on a quest with twelve dwarves to reclaim their home and treasure from a dragon.
    In our readings today, we hear about the small: Bethlehem, the Incarnate Christ, and the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Maybe Christ seems odd to have in a list of the small, but even Christ, in His Incarnation, became small, when compared to His Divine Nature.  But I’ll come back to that.
    First, Bethlehem.  Micah describes the little town as, “too small to be among the clans of Judah.”  Bethlehem means “House of Bread,” and had a long history in the Bible.  It was the burial place of Rachel, the wife of Jacob in the Book of Genesis; in the Book of Judges, Bethlehem was the home of a young Levite who served as an idol-worshipping priest, as well as the home of a concubine whose murder almost destroyed the Tribe of Benjamin; in the Book of Ruth, it is the home of Naomi, whose servant, Ruth, moved back with Naomi after they had left for Moab, and where Ruth married Boaz.  Boaz and Ruth gave birth to Obed, who was the grandfather of King David, who also came from Bethlehem.  After the Babylonians exiled the Davidic kings, it loses all fame, except in this passage from Micah, which is fulfilled when Christ is born in Bethlehem.  
    In our Gospel, we hear about the Blessed Virgin Mary, who, to us, seems anything but small.  But in her own time, she was not well known.  She was likely around fourteen years old at the time she conceived our Lord.  While she was from the family of King David, she had no power or prestige.  She was the daughter of an old couple Joachim and Anne, who had no other children.  She was, to everyone except God, a nobody.
    And even in the Letter to the Hebrews, the sacred author talks about Christ coming into the world in His Incarnation when He took on our human nature.  Even this was small, in its own way, because Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who created the universe and whom the heavens cannot contain, allowed Himself to be limited by our humanity, to do the will of the Father and reconcile us to God.  When comparing Jesus’ divinity and humanity, He did become rather small.
    But this is how God works.  St. Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, “God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.”  When great people do great things, they might think that it is them, not God, who accomplishes it.  When a weak or lowly or despised person does something great, they know that they could never have done it by themselves; they needed help from God.

    And, as we prepare for Christmas on Wednesday, that’s what God wants us to remember.  We could not, we cannot, save ourselves.  No amount of right living on our part could have ever bridged the gap between heaven and earth that Adam and Eve created when they disobeyed God and passed on their disobedience through original sin to us.  God had to save us.  Without Christ, we could not enter heaven, not even Abraham or Moses or King David.  All had sinned, and were deprived of the glory of God.  But God sent Jesus to save us, He whose name means “God saves,” and opened heaven not only for Abraham and Moses and King David, but also for us.  And even now that we are baptized, God gives us what we need to respond to that salvation.  Without the grace of God, we cannot do anything good even simply to cooperate with God’s salvation offered us through Christ.  The only thing that we can do without God’s grace is sin.  Every good thing requires God’s help.
    When we remember this, nothing can stop us, because nothing can stop God.  With God’s grace, Bethlehem became, not only the birthplace of a strong, human king, David, but the birthplace of the King of Kings, Jesus Christ.  With God’s grace, a young virgin who seemed to have nothing special about her became the Mother of the Redeemer.  Jesus Himself made Himself small so that He could attract us to Himself and save us by His invitation, rather than by force.  And we need only, by the grace that God gives us, respond to that invitation in order to enter the enteral home that God wants for us in heaven.  
    Some do believe that it is only the powerful that can keep evil at bay.  But, it is in the small ways that God defeats evil, with those who know of their smallness and yet rely on God.  May we cooperate, in our smallness, with the grace of God through small things, everyday deeds of we, ordinary folk, and so participate in Christ’s victory over sin and death.