3rd Thursday in Advent

“How shall I know this?”, asks Zechariah. I always wondered why Zechariah’s question was punished, while Mary’s question was rewarded – both placed very similar questions. In my opinion, the difference does not lie in the question itself, but in what lies underneath the question itself. Zechariah was a very pious man. He observed all the commandments, he diligently expected the Messiah, and as a priest, he celebrated the liturgy and all the rites full of good zeal and love. But when the angel appeared to him, right in the middle of the liturgy, he realized that God was real, incarnate. God was not simply an idea, a distant object of
faith, too far above the clouds to get enmeshed with our mundane, daily life’s issues. And if God is real, that means that I have no control over Him and that He can ask anything of me, He can do whatever He wills with my life. And Zechariah lacked that faith and fear, then, got hold of him. When fear overpowers our faith, we experience a lack of openness and creativity. We hold on to the old image we have of God, too afraid to discover the newness of life He wants for us. Mary, instead, had no such fear. In face of the challenge that her encounter with the angel brought to her life, she opened herself to what was new and unknown. And salvation is always new and unknown. Faith is a gift that should help us to open ourselves to
the creative newness of life that God always wants to bring into our life; faith should not be a boulder, a wall, a defense mechanism against our fears. May we learn from Zechariah and Mary how to give birth to Christ in our lives.