Tonight at Evening Prayer we will pray:

O Adonai and Prince of the house of Israel, you appeared to Moses in the fire of the flaming bush and you gave to him the Law on Mount Sinai. Come, Lord, O come to redeem us, come with your mighty arm. —Magnificat antiphon for December 18

Adonai, translated as “Lord” in the Old Testament, was a substitute name for God. In Advent, we embrace the hope that this nameless God chooses to reveal himself. 

The burning bush encounter at Mount Horeb foreshadows the Incarnation. The bush, burning but unconsumed, symbolizes the divine nature within a human being: the Word fully human and fully divine. 

Why does God reveal his name? As Pope Benedict XVI suggested, God enters into the network of relationships, a mission reaching its peak in Bethlehem.

Right before the global pandemic, my wife and I made a special pilgrimage to the holy land with our seven-month-old son, MJ. We went to Bethlehem and entered the historic Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional site of Christ’s birth. The priest in charge of the church saw that we had our newborn and graciously ushered us to the front of the line. 

Once inside the Grotto of the Nativity, we gently placed MJ over the silver star embedded in the floor, marking the exact spot where Jesus is believed to have been born.

For that brief, intense moment, I was filled with awe at my vocation as a husband and father. I was overcome with emotion, seeing in my own child the image of the baby Jesus. I knelt before the incredible mystery that the Almighty, the King of Kings, had once become a vulnerable baby – here. 

Jesus is close to us. We hold him as an innocent child. This is the new and everlasting relationship God established with us. He sealed this relationship through the consent and obedience of the Virgin Mary.

In our Lady of Guadalupe, we see the Blessed Mother as gentle, yet mighty. She is never pointing to herself, but to the Word within her. Standing in front of the sun, Our Lady of Guadalupe is the burning bush! As Moses gave the written law to God’s people as their great prophet, Mary gives the law its flesh and blood in the hiddenness of Bethlehem’s first Christmas.  

Perhaps this is the way God answers our plea for him to stretch out his mighty hand to set us free. In Mary, God has “shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit.” 

Have we spent intimate time with the name of Jesus? In these final days leading up to Christmas, let our prayer be his name. Say his name often with all the affections of your heart. As you say his name, see the face Mary and Joseph saw for the first time in the cave of Bethlehem. As you repeat his name over and again, feel the tenderness of Mary and the silent strength of Joseph. For the all-holy God revealed in the burning bush and in the womb of Israel comes to us in one definitive way: swaddled in the human story of the family. 

O Adonai, O Jesus … come.

For your meditation this day. From the monks of Saint John’s Abbey: