Meditations for Advent 2024 - Day 16 - He Has Put Down the Mighty from Their Thrones

Have you ever wondered how the humblest among us can reshape the world in extraordinary ways? Tune in to this Advent journey as we explore profound themes of humility, divine promise, and the transformative power of God's love. We open with a heartfelt prayer to deepen our understanding and love for God and Jesus Christ. This session offers a thoughtful reflection on Mary's proclamation of God's strength and how the Incarnation disrupts human expectations, lifting the lowly and casting down the mighty. We highlight God’s surprising choices and His love’s boundless reach, inviting you to see His work in the most unexpected places.

As we move to the next meditation, the promise to Abraham takes center stage, urging us to trust in God's eternal mercy and the promises yet to be fulfilled. We celebrate the destruction of false grandeur and the uplifting of the humble, finding inspiration in the steadfast faith of those who lived before Christ.

Chapters

• 0:03 Meditations on Humility and Promise
• 13:07 The Abundance of Faithful Promises

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Sancte. Sancte Amare morti necradas nos In tes pera verum. Good morning everyone, and welcome to day 16 of Advent. And if you can hear me right now, you can tell I have not gotten better from the last few days. You can tell I have not gotten better from the last few days. So let's hope that my voice holds out for this episode, because we have two meditations to read today, so I'm not going to go through everything I normally go through just because I want to save my voice. So let's get right to it. I'm going to put up the image on screen and we'll start with our prayer In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

Speaker 1: 1:13

Amen, jesus, my Savior, true God and true man and the true Christ, promised to the patriarchs and the prophets from the beginning of the world and, in time, faithfully bestowed to the holy people you have chosen. You have said by your holy and divine mouth this is eternal life, that they know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. Believing in these words, and with the help of thy grace, I wish to be attentive to the task of knowing God and knowing you. So do I draw as near to you as I can, with a lively faith, to know God in you and by you, and to know him in a manner worthy of God, that is, in a manner that leads me to love and to obey him, in accord with the words of your beloved disciple. He who says I know him but disobeys his commandments as a liar as well as your very own, he who has my commandments and keep them, he it is who loves me To know you well, oh, my God and dear Savior, I wish always, with the help of that grace, to contemplate you and all that befalls you and in all of your mysteries, and, at the same time, to know your Father, who gave you to us, and the Holy Ghost that you both have sent to us. So do I wish to love you with the true faith, a faith working through love. Amen. Meditation 25. He has put down the mighty from their thrones.

Speaker 1: 2:35

Mary spoke further of God's power so as to explain the effects of the incarnation of the Son of God. He has shown strength with his arms. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts Luke 1.51-52. All these wonders if it was not when he sent his son in, when he sent into the world his son, who has confounded kings in proud empires by the preaching of his gospel. In this work, his power shown forth all the more because god chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, even things that are not to bring to nothing, things that are so that no human being may boast in the presence of god. First corinthians, one, twenty seven or twenty nine midst. And when he said I thank thee, father, lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise in understanding and revealed them to babes Matthew 11.25. Did he not truly confound the proud and lift up those who were lowly in their eyes and in the eyes of others?

Speaker 1: 4:02

Mary herself is an example of such a person. He raised her above all others because she declared herself to be the lowest of all creatures. When he made for himself a dwelling place on earth, it was not in the palaces of kings. He chose poor, humble parents and all that the world disdained in order to cast down its pomp, and all that the world disdained in order to cast down its pomp. This was the proper character of divine power in the new alliance to make its virtue felt by its very weakness. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away? Luke 1.53. And when Was it not when he said Blessed are they who hunger, for they shall be satisfied. Woe to you who are satisfied, for you shall hunger. It is here that we must say with Mary, my soul magnifies the Lord and exalts only in His power, which will be seen in infirmity and loneliness. It is when God alone remains great that the soul finds peace.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Meditation 26. He remembered the promises he spoke to Abraham, remembered the promises he spoke to Abraham. Palaces and thrones have been cast down and hovels lifted up. The false grandeur of the world has been destroyed as a universal effect of the birth of Christ from Mary. Yet will she say nothing of the redemption of Israel, of the lost sheep, of the tribe of Israel, for whom the Son told us he had come? Let us listen to the end of the divine canticle. He has helped his servant, israel, luke 1.54,.

Speaker 1: 5:48

Not on account of the supposed merits of the presumptuous. On the contrary, he had laid low the pomp of the Pharisees and the proud thoughts of the doctors of the law. He received Nathanael, a true Israelite, straightforward, without presumption, without mask or guile. Such were the Israelites. He helped those who did not place their confidence in themselves, but instead in his great mercy. He remembered the promises he spoke to Abraham and to his posterity, promises that will endure forever.

Speaker 1: 6:26

How happy we are that God has deigned to bind himself to us by promises. He might have given us all that we needed, but by what necessity should he have promised these things to us, unless it was because he wished, as Mary said, for his mercy to endure from age to age by saving us through his gift and our fathers by their expectation of it? Let us, then, attach ourselves, with Mary, to the unchanging promises of the God who gave Jesus Christ to us. Let us say, with Elizabeth happy are we to have believed that what was promised to us would be fulfilled? If the promise of Christ was accomplished after so many centuries, can we doubt that the rest shall be accomplished at the end of the ages? If our fathers before the Messiah believed in him, how much more ought we, who have Jesus Christ as the guarantee of these promises, to believe? Let us abandon ourselves to the promises of grace, to these blessed hopes, and let us quench within us all of the deceitful hopes by which the world makes sport of us.

Speaker 1: 7:33

We are the true children of the promise. Children according to faith and not according to the flesh, who were shown to Abraham not in the person. Children of the promise, children according to faith and not according to the flesh. Who were shown to Abraham not in the person of Ishmael, nor in the other children who came forth from Abraham according to the laws of flesh and blood, but in the person of Isaac, who came according to the promise by grace and a miracle. Who came according to the promise by grace and a miracle. Abraham believed, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Romans 4.21 he says not only that he foresees what will happen, but also that he will do what he had promised. He had promised children to Abraham according to faith, and so he will give them. We are his children according to faith. He has made us children of faith and grace and we owe him this new birth. If God made us by grace, according to his promise, it was not by our works but by his mercy that we have been born and regenerated.

Speaker 1: 8:32

We are those whom Mary saw when she saw Abraham's posterity. We are those to whose salvation she consented when she said Let it be done to me according to your word. She carried all of us in her womb, with Jesus Christ, in whom we were. Let us then sing of her blessedness with our own. Let us proclaim that she is blessed and join ourselves to those who look upon her as their mother. Let us pray to this new Eve, who healed the wound of the first to show us, in the place of the forbidden fruit that brought about our death, the blessed fruit of her womb. Let us unite ourselves to the holy canticle in which Mary sang of our future deliverance. Let us say with St Ambrose may Mary's soul be in us to exalt the Lord. May Mary's spirit be in us to rejoice in our Savior. Like Mary, let us find our peace in seeing the waning glory of the world in the rising kingdom of God and the fulfillment of his will. And those are our meditations for today.

Speaker 1: 9:43

Both of them have this theme of putting aside our own glory. The first meditation is all about how Christ came to put down the mighty from their thrones and that Mary, you know Mary, who is the mother of God, the Theotokos, the queen of heaven and earth, declared herself to be the lowest of all creatures. And Christ. You know, when he made for himself a dwelling place on earth, it wasn't in the palace of a king, it was, you know. He chose poor and humble parents, in the Blessed Mother and in St Joseph.

Speaker 1: 10:28

And as Bishop Bosway finishes off that first meditation, he says that it is when God alone remains great that the soul finds peace. I think that we chase our own greatness, as we do everything we can to magnify ourselves, is when we are least at peace. I know that has certainly been true in my own life that it was when I lived for myself that I was the least happy and that we can only find peace when we put God above all and when God alone remains great in our lives. And for me that's been accomplished most through fulfilling my vocation as a husband and raising my children in the faith, putting myself, uh to the side, um, and trying to magnify, you know, god in the lives of my wife and my children, um, that's, that's when I've found the most peace and happiness in life. So you must always try to remember to make God, god alone, great in our lives. Let me just look through the second meditation.

Speaker 1: 11:57

In the second meditation, the line that that stood out to me is the one that it says if our fathers before the Messiah believed in him, how much more ought we, who have Jesus Christ as the guarantee of these promises, to believe? Who held the faith throughout the old covenant, those who converted even at the time of Christ. They had so much less to keep them strong in their faith than we do. If you think of the patriarchs Abraham, isaac, jacob, joseph, moses you know all of them. They had this promise, these promises from God, but those promises weren't to be fulfilled for centuries, and yet they held true to them. They held true to the faith. They held true to them. They held true to the faith.

Speaker 1: 13:04

You know those who were alive at the time of Christ or shortly after.

Speaker 1: 13:07

You know they obviously had Jesus Christ, of course, but think of the saints and the miracles that have come since that. We have to help us in our faith. You know those at the time of Christ didn't have all of those, and yet they still had faith and they still converted. So think of everything that we have as guarantee of these promises from the church. We have so much more than anyone else before us in history and of course, those who come after will have even more as we have more and more saints, more and more miracles and such.

Speaker 1: 13:47

But if, if those who lived centuries or millennia before Christ were able to hold true to God's promises, then then we should be uh, it shouldn't even be a question for us. So, as bad as the world can seem and as terrible as it might be, and as hard as it might be to stay true to faith in today and the world today, compared to times past, we have so much more to rely on than anyone else before us. So keep that in mind and keep that in mind through the rest of Advent as we continue here Tomorrow our meditations on Mary staying with Elizabeth for three months and then the birth of John the Baptist. Anyways, I apologize for the voice. I know it probably makes listening not so great. Um, so I apologize. Hopefully this passes here soon, but I appreciate all of you who watch or listen and I will see you all again tomorrow. Thank you,