I wonder if during Advent we can ask whether that first Christmas could’ve happened the way we recall it did without the silent waiting, without the quiet yearning of the centuries of hopeful anticipation of the people of Israel.
Zechariah, when it is announced to him by the archangel that Elizabeth is going to have a baby, is struck dumb, losing his power of speech. It’s almost as though speech is completely useless in the face of the marvelous ways of God. Elizabeth herself speaks only a few words that seem to be chosen carefully, to praise God and salute her blessed kinswoman, Mary. Joseph says absolutely nothing that’s recorded in the Gospel, and Mary’s divine maternity is contingent upon … what? Her quiet, docile, humble discipleship – a stillness, a stillness captured so well by medieval and Renaissance artists, as they portray the dramatic aloneness in the silence at the moment of the Annunciation.
All of these great personalities of Advent teach us the wonder of silence, the necessity of stillness at the most pivotal moments in the economy of salvation. Then what about Our Lord? Jesus was born in silence and obscurity. He lived a quiet and hidden life for thirty years. That had to be a deliberate decision on the part of the Son of God to spend more than 90 percent of His time on earth in silence and solitude. …
I can’t help but believe that He must have absorbed this preference for silence from both His Heavenly Father and from His earthly foster father, St. Joseph. St. John of the Cross comments, “The Father spoke One Word,” which was His Son, “and this Word He speaks in the eternal silence and in silence it must be heard by the soul.”
Source: Advent Reflections: Come, Lord Jesus!, pp. 41-42.
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