Homily: Dec 9 2016 - St. Juan Diego - God chooses the meek

St. Juan Diego is another wonderful Advent saint; he shows us that charity, love, and faithfulness often take us outside of our comfort zones, but when we trust God, wondrous things are possible.  

When the Blessed Mother appeared to him and told him that he had been chosen to be her messenger to the bishop, Juan Diego insisted that he couldn’t do it: he was not one of the great or important persons, he was too insignificant to take such a message from the Mother of God to the bishop.

But the Virgin Mother of Guadalupe insisted that he could do it. The Virgin answered Juan Diego’s protests of unworthiness, saying, “Yes, you are the least of my children”, and that is precisely why you are being chosen.

In choosing the lowly Juan Diego, Our Lady followed a long line of stories in Scripture where God chooses the lowly, the barren, the tongue-tied, the meek, to do his work. God sends the powerless to confront the powerful. As St. Paul wrote, “God uses the meek to confound the proud.”

In the work of God to which all of us are called, we are often tempted to put ourselves down; to think we are not good enough or holy enough to take up a particular way of service. “I’m too poor, too busy, too uncomfortable, too uneducated, too old”. But in choosing Juan Diego, the least of her children, Mary shows that it is our excuses that are not good enough; if the poor uneducated Juan Diego can bear a message for God, so can we.

At the time of Juan Diego, the Aztec culture was in full swing; 10s of thousands of human sacrifices would be offered on the steps of the Aztec pyramids in honor of their pagan gods. Juan Diego, in a sense, started a revolution; an end to an era of death and the beginning of a new era of peace, through the spreading of the Gospel.

God chooses the little ones to do great things in history. Our vocation, our calling, also is to build up the church in this culture, to work for peace in our time.

An important Advent Lesson: to prepare our souls for the coming of Christ, we must never allow fear or excuses to keep us from the charity to which we are called, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.