Fourth Sunday of Advent 2020

The Lord is with you

Lectionary readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 and Luke 1:26-38

We have heard read to us two episodes, one from the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, and the other from the Gospels. And in each, one person says to another, ‘the Lord is with you.’ And I wonder what it means, to say to someone that the Lord is with them? Mary is quite right: these are perplexing words, and we should ponder what sort of greeting this might be. It is a highly unusual one, but not without precedent, occurring, as far as I can tell, four times in our Scriptures. The first time is when ‘the angel of the Lord’ addresses a young man named Gideon (Judges 6:12). Gideon is not quite, but as good as, a nobody from nowhere; the very last sort of person he (and we) might expect to be sent an angelic messenger. Moreover, Gideon is doing something highly unusual: he is threshing grain in a wine press. I say highly unusual, and in any other year it would have been, but, in a year when his people were sore pressed by a recurring threat that curtailed every aspect of their lives, it was probably just one of any number of adaptive practices constituting a ‘new normal’. In any other year, we, too, would find threshing grain in a wine press highly unusual; and yet, here we are, receiving the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, usually found in bread and wine, ‘in one kind,’ in bread alone.

The next time we come across this phrase in quite the same way is, as we heard in our first reading, when the prophet Nathan says it to king David [though in the form ‘the Lord be with you!’ it is used by David’s ancestor Boaz as a greeting to his harvesters (Ruth 2:4) and by king Saul as a blessing-cum-dismissal to David as he goes to face the Philistine, Goliath (1 Samuel 17:37)]. Whereas the Lord wishes to call out the ‘mighty warrior’ from within Gideon, with David, the Lord has already called him out, from following the sheep to be prince over his people. Surrounding enemies have been subdued—though the Lord has more to do, to establish rest from all [David’s] enemies.

The third time we meet this phrase, it is addressed by the prophet Azariah, to Asa and all Judah and Benjamin: ‘the Lord is with you, while you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you abandon him, he will abandon you.’ (2 Chronicles 15:2). Like David, Asa is king. Like Gideon, the territory of his people is broken, over-whelmed and ravaged by am enemy. And whereas David does not get to build, Asa must tear down, must overthrow practices that have come between God’s people and their God. In Asa’s day, they must rediscover their identity, must renew their covenant commitment, and, flowing from that renewal, must experience a new normal in worship.

And last but by no means least, the angel Gabriel addresses these words to Mary, who, like Gideon, is as near to nobody from nowhere as you could care to imagine; who like Gideon and Asa lives among a people whose daily lives are constrained by invasive, occupying, inhumane forces; who is connected, by marriage, into the house of David. ‘Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you.’

The thing that runs through each one of these occurrences, carried by these words, is a recurring promise of peace, of living no longer disturbed by enemies. A peace that is enduring, albeit conditional: a seemingly impossible peace that can be embraced, or abandoned, with costly consequence.

Gideon’s response is timid, hoping for reassurances. David’s response is repentant, willing to significantly adapt his plans, for a better vision. Asa’s response is full of zeal, if somewhat misguided, simultaneously taking things too far and not quite far enough. And Mary’s response is, ‘Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ What word? The Lord is with you.

And here we are, in the days before Christmas, at the tail end of a year in which our lives, communally and personally, have been deeply disrupted by a global pandemic; in which our political leaders are playing the kind of brinkmanship, with our neighbours in Europe, that turns friends and allies into enemies; and, to the West, a polarised United States totters on the brink of civil war. May it not be so. Gideon, David, Asa, and Mary are given to us, to learn how (and how not) to orientate and reorientate our lives, as a people set free by the Prince of Peace, not at war with one another but reconciled to God, our neighbour, and one another. Even in the most unlikely circumstances.

This Christmas, despite everything, may you know peace. The Lord is with you.