21 DECEMBER – EMBER FRIDAY IN ADVENT

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

The Church does not read anything from the Prophet Isaias today. She merely gives, in the Office of Matins, a sentence of that chapter of Saint Luke’s Gospel which relates the mystery of our Lady’s Visitation: and to this she subjoins a fragment of Saint Ambrose’s Homily upon that passage. The considerations and affections with which this important event of our Lady’s life ought to inspire the faithful will be given further on in the Proper of the Saints.

The Station for today is in the Church of the Holy Apostles, which many suppose to have been first built by Constantine, and in which the glorious bodies of the two holy Apostles Philip and James the Less, buried under the altar, await the second Coming of Him who chose them as his co-operators in the work of the first and who, on the last day, will give them to sit upon thrones near His own, judging the twelve Tribes of Israel (Matthew xix.).

Gospel – Luke i. 39

At that time: Mary arose, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Judah, and entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elizabeth.

Praise be to you, O Christ.

Homily – Saint Ambrose of Milan:

When anyone asks another for credence he is bound to give some reasonable ground. And so the Angel, when he announced to Mary the counsel of God, gave as a proof the conception of Elizabeth, then aged and barren, that Mary might perceive by this example that with God nothing is impossible. When the holy Virgin had heard it she arose and went to visit her cousin. She did not go to see if what she had heard was true, because she did not believe God or because she knew not who the messenger had been, or yet because she doubted the fact adduced in proof. She went joyfully as one who has received a mercy in answer to his vows goes to pay the same. She went with devotion, as a godly person goes to execute a religious duty. She went into the hill country in joyful haste. And is it not something that she went up into the hills? God was already in her womb, and her feeling bore her continually upward. The grace of the Holy Spirit knows no slow working.