Today we see in the Gospel God’s respect and love for what is small. Mary and Elizabeth were two undistinguished women, living in a couple of villages in an unfashionable province of the Roman Empire. In the eyes of their world they counted for nothing. And yet God entered into their lives in a way that would change the history of the world. God is the God of the very small as well as the very large; God of the micro, you might say, just as much as God of the macro. Elizabeth’s unborn child leaps for joy at the approach of Jesus. Elizabeth’s child, of course, would be John the Baptist, a great and rugged saint, full of courage.
In our prayer, we have a weakness. We do not pray with trust and confidence because we feel that God is far away, belonging to a long-ago time, and we think that if God is the Creator of the universe, then the divine mind is full of colossal things, cosmic things, and it is absurd that God would or could be interested in my toothache, or my exams, or my family. We treat God as a simple human, like an overworked minister in the government, or a general in charge of a lot of troops. But this is a total misunderstanding of the nature of God. Being responsible for their creation, God can do fractals as easily as galaxies; little people as easily as big people. We can approach Christmas this week with renewed trust and confidence.