Friday of the Third Week of Advent
As you probably have noticed, I have used these Friday reflections in Advent to think about the symbolism of the Advent wreath. Today, I'm thinking about the symbolism of the pink candle, the third candle we light in Advent, whose symbolic meaning is "joy." The candle is pink (and this week's vestments are pink) because we are now halfway to the feast of Christmas and that fact alone is meant to give us joy. (Likewise, we have a similar halfway point in Lent, where one Sunday is pink and marks the halfway point to the feast of Easter.)
In secular terms, joy is often conflated with happiness, but in Christian terms, joy is about rejoicing in God, regardless of one's external, secular circumstances. In order to rejoice in God despite our circumstances, what do we need? We need a certainty that God is acting in our lives no matter what, and knowledge that God is good and loves us. Today's scriptures offer to us these things because they focus on the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation - the belief that Jesus is both fully God and fully man.
People are often tempted to skip over today's gospel reading (Matthew 1:1-17) because it seems like a boring list of Jesus' ancestors. It is a list, and it may be boring to some, but it is also Matthew's attempt to make a couple of important points. First, Jesus is related to other people God has spoken to in the past. We can, should and must draw large, long connections between the Old Testament people and the New Testament. Sometimes people say that the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath, and the God of the New Testament is a God of love. But even to say that is to suggest that there are two gods. On the contrary, Matthew is suggesting that the very same God who spoke to Abraham and who made David the most famous of the Israelite kings is the God who is Jesus.
A second point Matthew is trying to make: Jesus has no pure lineage. Tamar and Ruth are both ancestors of his; Tamar was a prostitute (Genesis 38) and Ruth was a Moabite woman (see the book of Ruth), from some of the very people the Israelites were trying to overthrow in the land of Canaan. In fact, if we look closely at individuals in Jesus' genealogy, we would quickly come to realize that none of his ancestors, including David, can count as "perfect" in God's eyes. They are unable to follow God's will perfectly, they commit adultery and murder, they fail in so many ways.
And yet, God chooses them to be the people who will bear the Messiah and who will welcome God made flesh into our own lives. This is the joyful but almost incomprehensible good news in today's Old Testament reading (Genesis 49:2, 8-10), that even from sinful "Judah" will come Jesus, the perfect God-man.
This is good news for us, as well. As we wait to welcome Jesus into our own broken and sinful lives, let us joyfully recognize that God chooses us where and when we are and that we do not have to measure up to some degree of perfection in order to be worthy of that call. God wants us to meet Jesus and so sends him to the smallest and humblest places - the backwater town of Bethlehem, and a stinking stable. God meets us, our entire human selves, exactly where we are in our sorrows and troubles, and that fact should cause us to shout, "In the Lord, I will rejoice!"
- Jana M. Bennett