Until the liturgical reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, readings from the nativity narratives at Mass were confined largely to the corresponding feasts of the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity of St John the Baptist, the Nativity of Our Lord, the Holy Innocents, the Circumcision, the Epiphany, and the Presentation / Purification; Advent moved us from the focus on the Second Coming of Christ to the coming and ministry of John the Baptist – each certainly encouraging self-
examination, repentance, and preparation for the coming of Christ – without explicitly leading us to the Nativity, whose celebration is in one sense an ‘interruption’ of the arc leading from John the Baptist in Advent to the Baptism of Our Lord after the feast of the Epiphany.
However, the Masses of the Advent Ember Days featured the Annunciation account on Wednesday and the Visitation account on Friday, preparing for the account of St John the Baptist’s message on the Sunday, and other Western liturgical traditions did anticipate Christmas by reading the Annunciation account shortly before it: the Mozarabic Rite (the historic rite of Spain) on 18 December, and the Ambrosian Rite (the historic rite of Milan) on the Last Sunday of Advent.
The newer three-year lectionary model, following these examples,* provides on the Fourth Sunday of Advent a narrative more immediately preparatory to Christmas: the Annunciation to St Joseph (Year A), the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary (Year B), and the Visitation of the Our Lady to St Elizabeth (Year C). A further feature of the Revised Common Lectionary now used by the Episcopal Church is the use of canticles in place of a Gradual Psalm in Advent, especially in Year C. Thus this Sunday we read the Visitation account, focus a good deal on the Blessed Virgin, and sing her song, the Magnificat (Lk 1.46–55 – which in fact appears in the Visitation account).
The Gospel, the Canticle, and other texts we sing this week prompt us to wonder, with Elizabeth and Mary, with Joseph and Zechariah, with Simeon and Anna and the shepherds and magi, that a baby born, with all attendant dangers, in a barn, of an unwed teenaged mother, of the ‘least of the clans of Judah’ (as the lesson from Micah puts it) – the merest shoot from the seemingly all-but-dead stump of the Chosen People – could be the Son of God, the Word-made-Flesh, God-among-us. And last week’s tragic deaths in Connecticut, and the deaths that continue every minute of every day around the world as a result of disease, disaster, starvation, and war, may prompt us to wonder what difference God’s coming among us in such weakness and humility could possibly make. Yet again and again our tradition tells us that among the remnant, the last and least and lost, is precisely where ‘the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’. And the innocents – the children in Newtown, the infants in Judaea under Herod’s rule, Our Lord himself – in their birth and in their death are martyrs (that is, witnesses) by whose wordless testimony, no less than the Baptist’s forthright words and Our Lady’s willingness to serve, our hearts can be prompted to turn and seek the Lord.
* ...those responsible for the revision [of the Lectionary for Mass] took pains to safeguard the liturgical tradition of the Roman Rite, but valued highly the merits of all systems of selecting, arranging, and using the biblical readings in other liturgical families and in certain particular Churches.
General Introduction to the Order of Readings for Mass, §59