Dec 24: Love is the One, True Gift

André Beauneveu: King David

Friday of the Fourth Week in Advent

Reading I: 2 Sm 7:1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16

But that same night the word of the Lord came to Nathan: Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build me a house to live in (NRSV, 2Sm 7:4)?

This, Lord, is the time of the year that we are very conscious of sharing gifts. So many of us at Christmas time want to bestow gifts on those we love.

David, after he settled in Jerusalem, thinking about the Ark of Covenant being sheltered only in a tent, resolved to make you, Lord, a special gift, a gift beyond the animals, first fruits and incense offered in sacrifice. David decided to build a house for you to dwell in, a house made of precious cedar, a Temple.

Your answer, Lord, to David, delivered by the prophet Nathan, must have given him something to think about . . . at least for awhile for David continued with his plans anyway, perhaps on a more modest scale.

Lord, you made very clear to David that you had no need of a house of cedar. “Are you the one to build me a house to live in?” With that you proceeded to recite all of the wonderful things that you had done for David and the people. It was then that you, Lord, through Nathan’s words, promised to build a house for David, not a house of wood, but a ruling house and a kingdom that would last forever, a house and a kingdom that we acknowledge finally to have been realized in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Giving gifts is a very human way of expressing symbolically our love for one another. But give a gift to you, Lord? A gift of what? Everything that is ours, even our very selves, is gift from you. Not only David should have listened but all of us should listen.

After sacrifice upon sacrifice offered to no avail, after David’s ineffectual desire to please you with a temple, it is in the Lord Jesus that we have finally found the Way. Father, you beget, give life, to your Son. You and the Son then share that life, given and received, in Love who is the Holy Spirit. It is in Jesus that we have finally learned that the life that you share one with the other is also, in a much lesser but nevertheless real sense, shared also with us. When we accept the gift of divine life from you, Father, that gift truly to be accepted must always be shared in Love as you and the Son share in the Holy Spirit.

This then is the one gift that we can give you, Lord. Participating in your very life we can go out to one another and to you in the Love that is ultimately your Spirit. We can actually be caught up in the inner life that you share, Father, with your Son in the Holy Spirit.

Lord, we build churches, temples and mosques not really as gifts for you. In the end we build them for ourselves, so that they may help us to focus on you and what we must do with our lives. There are many created things that we may surrender up to you but like sacred buildings their final value is to help us find ourselves by finding your presence in our lives.

There is then only one, true gift, Lord, that we can give you. It is given in Jesus who is the Way. It is your very life, bestowed freely upon us, which is shared in Love with one another and with you.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.