At first, Juan Diego really misses the point.

He thinks the Virgin’s only goal is to have a chapel built in her honor on this hill. I’ll do whatever you ask, he tells her, but you’ll have more luck if you choose someone else. 

But in this case, the messenger was the message. 

Guadalupe wanted to say to the Indigenous and mestizo peoples of the Americas: Jesus doesn’t belong to the colonizers. He is a God for and of the colonized. He’s yours. And the message to the bishop who sent Juan Diego away three times, and to all the rest of us who might have doubted a Chichimec peasant arriving on our doorstep with visions of the Blessed Mother: Whose experiences of God do you trust? Who are you allowing to teach you about God? God prefers the poor. Do you? 

In today’s gospel, we hear the very beginning of the Magnificat—another instance of the messenger being integral to the message. God forged a path into the world through an unmarried kid from a backwater town, and from that experience she proclaims that the Lord has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. 

I love that line. So much. When I read it, though, I can’t help but look around me and ask, When? 

All of Advent is about that question. When? 

Christ is coming. Christ has come. Christ is come. But Christ is also coming, and we’re supposed to be both patient and alert. 

The Kingdom of God is at hand, John cries out in the desert. A child is born to us, Isaiah foretells, and His dominion is vast and forever peaceful. Then that child was born. The Kingdom of God was ordained. And we’re still praying Thy kingdom come together each week, waiting and wading through injustice and a world that is the opposite of “forever peaceful.” 

When, Lord? 

But there’s another, more uncomfortable question that comes to mind when I read the Magnificat: Am I the rich, or the hungry? Do I feel as though I’ve been sent away empty? Or am I full of good things? And what exactly am I hungry for? What am I empty of? 

When we read Mary’s words and ask, When?, does it ever occur to us that the only thing running behind schedule is…us? That when we ask the Lord, When?, his response might be, You tell me? That while we’re waiting on God, he’s waiting on us? 

After the prophesied child was born and grew up, he taught us that the Kingdom of God is in our midst. It’s a kingdom whose ambassador is that Chichimec peasant, whose queen is that unmarried kid, whose royal heirs are the poor in spirit. That kingdom is already real; it is already here. We just have to make up our minds—every day anew—to see it, join it and build it up.