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In my homily last week, I mentioned how Zechariah let his fear take the place his faith should have in his heart. He doubted the words of the angel and after that, he became dumb and he entered a long and dark period in his interior life. While John the Baptist grew in Elisabeth’s womb, Christ was silent growing in Zechariah’s heart as well.

“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.

On Christmas Day the Vigil Mass will be at 2:00 a.m and the Day Mass at 8:00 a.m.

St. Luke is very careful to give time, place, naming the various leaders, both Roman and Jewish, because he wanted to situate what follows in actual history. This event really took place; John, son of Zecheriah and Elizabeth, was the herald preparing the way of the Lord, his very cousin “the Lamb of God.” John fully lived his vocation to his martyrdom by calling people to repentance, still today calling us; he was filled with the inspired words of the prophet Isaiah and on fire as the Lord’s herald.

“Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you”. In the Gospel this morning the angel Gabriel greets Mary full of grace almost as if that were her last name: Mary Full-of-grace. And she is in fact filled with the grace of God, more than any other human being. What the angel said is truer of Mary than of any other creature: “You have found favor with God”