A major theme of the Advent season, and really of the Christian Faith in general, is that nothing is by accident.  When God inspired the prophet Isaiah to describe the “voice crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord,” he had everything in mind; John the Baptist, Christ himself, everything that would come after, right down even to this Mass at which this reading would be read.  All that and more was in mind of God when he inspired Isaiah to utter these prophecies.  God’s plans and designs are precise and detailed, and nothing is ever wasted.  It’s why the gospels go into so much detail, like at the beginning of today’s gospel passage.  St. Luke starts by telling us the date: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,” and that would be enough for everyone to know when he was talking about. It’d be like us saying “In the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.”  It’s enough information already.  But St. Luke continues, “when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.”  I get it.  It’d be like me saying, “In the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, when Ned McWherter was Governor of Tennessee and Phil Bredesen was Mayor of Nashville and Msgr. Kmiec was Bishop and Father Cunningham was Pastor of St. Patrick and Mrs. McGillicuddy was on the school board…”  At a certain point, you’d say: “I get it, okay, 1993.  Move on.”  But the gospel writers do this quite a bit.  Think of the long genealogy from Adam to Christ that gets read either from St. Matthew or St. Luke at a couple of points leading up to Christmas.  The human and divine authors of Sacred Scripture are constantly trying to get it into our heads that details are important.  Small things matter.  Nothing is by accident.  If you’re a reader, this is a famously important theme in the novel Moby Dick: there’s all this seemingly totally excessive detail about whale blubber and harpoon maintenance and so forth, but all that winds up being hugely important to the themes of the novel when you get to the end and kind of think about the whole thing.  And that kind of literary device is at work in Sacred Scripture too, especially when it’s articulating the process and unfolding of salvation history.  God was always setting things up.  He was always preparing.  He always had the end in mind.  Nothing is by accident.  Nothing is by accident. 

Now, that’s not just true for all of us.  That’s true for each of us.  The details of our lives, the people whose paths we’ve crossed, the experiences we’ve had, the various names and places and details in the chapters of our life’s novel, even the struggles that have been in our way: none of this was by accident.  And God, who is the architect of this vast complex of the created universe, is perfectly wise.  That means he sees the whole picture always.  Our life is like a single thread that courses its way through a massive tapestry.  We move alongside or cross other threads; we interact with other threads that we’re close to and share common colors with, making some kind of image together.  And the color of our thread changes as we move along the course of our life: sometimes its golden with joy; sometimes red with passion; sometimes beige with routine; sometimes black with despair, or purple with suffering.  And even if we can sort of detect some of what’s immediately around us, we don’t really see the whole picture, yet.  But God does.  Because he’s above the entire tapestry, looking down at all of it, and in fact, weaving together and guiding and directing all of it.  One of the joys of heaven will be our opportunity to be drawn up to some of God’s perspective, to be able, in some way, to look down upon the entire tapestry and to see how my little thread, with all its messy and confusing color-changes and seemingly insignificant mundane little details, was actually part of a magnificent, rational, meaningful picture.  This is why the gospel-writers are constantly hitting us with these details and names and other minutiae.  Nothing is by accident. 

A lot of what our hope is about, is the trust that God really is guiding and arranging this whole intricate design of my life, down to the last detail.  If I give myself over to him, and stay close to him in prayer and worship and the reception of the sacraments, he’ll fix the things that need fixing in my life, and he’ll let me keep and bear those crosses that will lead to my salvation.  And it’s his business to know which is which.  I couldn’t possibly know from my position, progressing slowly down the little thread of my life.  But I trust his perspective and his wisdom and his goodness.  I believe that the details matter; I trust that he is giving me everything I need for my salvation; and I hope that what he has already accomplished for the whole world in the Incarnation, and the Passion, and the Resurrection, and the Ascension of Christ, will be made real and tangible for me in my life as well.