Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year A (2025) - Fr Anthony Walsh, OP

In these last days of Advent our attention is turned towards the mystery of the Incarnation, for which we are preparing. And we see from our Gospel today, it does not begin in brightness. It begins in darkness. Not the dramatic darkness of rebellion or despair, but the quiet darkness of night: the darkness of sleep, of waiting, of a world stumbling. Saint Matthew does not begin the story of Jesus’ birth with angels singing or light flooding the sky. He begins with a man asleep.

Joseph sleeps. Not because he is careless or indifferent, but because he has, in a certain sense, reached the limit of what he can understand. He is a just man. He believes in God. He keeps the law. He desires to act rightly. Yet when he learns that Mary is with child, his faith reaches its boundary. From everything he knows, from everything experience and reason can offer him, he is baffled. And so he resolves to act quietly, mercifully, without scandal. In this he acts justly, as a model of masculinity that he is, with no accusation, no loud denouncements.

Joseph is not in the darkness of sin. Saint Augustine says that Joseph did not doubt Mary’s virtue; he doubted what had never yet been seen. This is the darkness of reasonable unbelief: not a denial of God, but an inability to imagine that God might act here, now, in a way so utterly new.

The Incarnation does not burst upon the world with violence. God does not shout. He visits. The ancient Church loved this word: visit. To visit is not to overwhelm, but to enter another’s space quietly, respectfully, bringing presence rather than force. Saint Augustine says that Christ came to us quietly, so that we might awaken rather than flee.

Joseph dreams. And in that dream the first light of the new day begins to rise. The angel does not accuse him. There is no reproach for doubt, no rebuke for hesitation. There is only revelation. “What is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” This is not an explanation in the ordinary sense; it is illumination. Joseph is not given a theory to master, but a truth to receive. Faith does not begin by seeing more clearly; it begins by being given light.

This is why, in the final days of Advent, the Church sings at Vespers on this 21st December, not a request for answers, but a prayer: O Oriens—O Rising Sun—come and visit us. Enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

The virginal womb of Mary itself becomes part of this language of light. The Fathers insist that the point is not curiosity about biology, but wonder at origin. Saint Ambrose says that no human fire kindled this light; it rose as the sun rises, by the will of God alone. The Incarnation is light without human flame. It is new creation, not improvement. It cannot be predicted, controlled, or delayed. Where nature reaches its limit, grace begins, lest faith rest in habit rather than wonder.

Matthew gives the Child a name: Emmanuel—God with us. Not God above us, not God after us, but God with us. Saint Leo the Great says that He who made the day chose to be born in the night. The light does not remain on the horizon. It enters the house. It takes flesh. It dwells among us.

And this light does not come merely to console. He comes to save. “He will save his people from their sins.” Sin is not only a transgression, but it is a kind of night: a loss of direction, a loss of trust, a life lived as though God were distant or inactive. Saint Bede says that those who sit in darkness are not only the wicked, but all who live without the light of faith. The Incarnation matters because it ends the long assumption that God will not act.

The Gospel ends quietly, as it began. Joseph wakes. And he obeys. There is no speech recorded. No questions. No conditions. Saint Bernard says that faith is proven not when it understands, but when it acts. Joseph does not yet see the Child. Bethlehem is still ahead. But he has light enough to rise. And in that obedience, the day begins.

In a sense, Joseph is the first man to live in the day of Christ. Before the angels sing. Before the shepherds arrive. Before the light is visible to the world. The dawn begins in a dream, in obedience, in a man who wakes and allows God’s light to reorder his life.

The Church sings O Oriens because she knows that we still live between night and day. We still sit at times in darkness: of doubt, of weariness, of settled expectation that nothing will really change. And yet the Church dares to pray, not because the night is gone, but because the sun has already risen.

The Incarnation is God visiting us to awaken us from darkness. Faith is waking to discover that the light has already come.

O Morning Star,

splendour of light eternal, and sun of righteousness,

come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death.

O Oriens,

splendor lucis aeternæ, et sol justitiæ,

veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

Fr Anthony Walsh, OP is the Master of Novices, assigned to St Laurence's Priory, North Adelaide, South Australia.