COLLECT SERIES
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THE MASS COLLECT SERIES ICON. |
COLLECT
The Collect
for the 4th Sunday of Advent Year A reads as follows:
Pour
forth, we beseech you, O Lord your grace into our hearts,
That we,
to whom the Incarnation of Christ your Son
Was made
known by the message of an Angel,
May by
His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection
Who lives
and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
One
God for ever and ever.
REFLECTION
QUESTIONS
In
making this prayer tangible the following reflection questions emerged.
1.Why
is this Angelus prayer used as a Collect on this 4th Sunday of
Advent?
2.
What specific grace do I wish to receive from Jesus this Christmastide?
3.What
does Jesus as God’s Son being born mean
for me?
4.
What message does God wish to give me through His Angel?
5.
Ponder the life of Jesus- born to be a Saviour of humanity through His Passion
and death and to give me the glory of His Resurrection. What does this mean for
my life this coming week?
GOSPEL REFLECTION
The Gospel is from Matthew 1:18-24. Here we learn
how God does not do things our way but His.
If God had preserved the kingdom of Judah (which he could so easily have
done), and if the Messiah, the son of David, were to be born in the royal
palace in Jerusalem, it would be natural and we would almost say, more fitting
the dignity of the Messiah. Instead, God
allowed the kingly line, and the throne of Judah, to disappear, and he chose a
humble carpenter of Nazareth, a true descendant of David but a lowly one, to be
the foster-father of his divine Son, when he took human nature and came on
earth to "dwell among us."
Perhaps we may say or feel that we do not understand His
ways. Maybe we ask in prayer for
something so very much needed and we seemingly
get no answer or a definite no to it.
God does not value bank accounts or social standing but rather virtue.
This is evident in the choice He made for the foster father of Jesus. No king sat on the throne of Judah, not even
David himself, who was more acceptable to God as foster-father for his Son, than
Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth.
The Church puts
forth Joseph as our reminder to imitate Joseph and Mary who were the humblest
of the humble, the kindliest of the kindly, and the greatest-ever believers in
God's goodness and mercy. We can never hope to equal them, but we can follow
them humbly.
This is the last Sunday of our preparation for Christmas, the
anniversary of Christ's birth. Like Joseph, we can all feel unworthy of the honour
of welcoming him into our hearts and our homes. We are indeed unworthy, not
because we have little of this world's goods, but because we have so little
humility, so little charity, so little faith and trust in God's goodness. Let
us try to imitate Joseph and Mary.
We realise that
we can never make ourselves worthy of HIs infinite love, but let us imitate
Joseph and accept the honour which God is giving us, as we trust and work
towards through growing in virtue that God will continue to make us daily more worthy of Him by how we live our lives.
In God’s eyes we are always
worthy of Him. After all, He loved us so
much to be born for us, died and rose again for us- why .. so that we could be
renewed once more as children of God and live with Him for ever in Heaven.
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