December 13, 2009
Third Sunday of Advent
By Rev. Joe McCloskey, S.J.
On that day, it shall be said to Jerusalem: Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged! The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a mighty savior; He will rejoice over you with gladness, and renew you in his love, He will sing joyfully because of you, as one sings at festivals. Zephaniah 3:16-18a
Now the people were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Messiah. John answered them all, saying, "I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. Luke 3:15-16
Piety
Consolation is the overflowing of the joy of the Lord from our hearts. It is the smile that reaches the lips when the sun comes out after a long spell of not so gentle rain. It is the light that gives clarity of vision when we are lost in the darkness of sadness. There are joys that bring out the best of feelings from our heart when all is going well. Even more so, joy without a cause is a special sign of the presence of God. The third Sunday of Advent is a Sunday for joy. Christmas is almost upon us. The Joy of expectation is ready to give way to the happiness that the loved one has come. Consolation is the realization that we have nothing to fear. A mighty savior renews us in his love. Christmas carols come to mind unbidden. The silent nights of our lives have a special song. We are being called to rejoice in the Lord. He is near. God is ready to listen to us because he is soon to be one of us again. We look back on what has happened to our world and we know that Christ has come. We believe that he is the one that has been expected. God has loved us so much that he wanted to be one of us. We believe that he has come to save us. We celebrate his coming in a special way. We look back on his having come as if he has not yet come. We realize that expectations make for the best of celebrations. If we have looked forward hard enough for his coming, the celebration of his being here is all the more. Advent is truly a preparation for celebrating his coming again. We look to his coming as something that we are ready for.
Study
Our study takes on a special form. We study exactly how ready we are for his coming. Goodness of life is the best preparation. How I share what I have in life with others is the question. What do I have that I do not use or do not need? How can I bring greater simplicity into my life? What do I need to despoil myself of in order to be more like the Word? He who needed no one came as the baby to make a child’s need of parents into a God relationship. How he felt the hungers and the thirst of life give us a connection with Christ in how we need one another. We look over all the things we can rejoice in to give greater force to our rejoicing in his coming to be one of us. We look at how many reasons we have to rejoice and take the opportunity to rejoice in some of them. We honestly make the decision to notify our faces that we are happy so that our joy may reach the surface of our faces. It is too easy to look at all the things that are sad about our world. Rather than being part of the solution for what is wrong, we all too often add to the sadness of the world by not rejoicing when we have the best reason of all to rejoice in the fact that Jesus is one of us.
Action
The best action we can take this week is to plan to share our joy. All the reasons we have to be joyful need to be offered to the Lord in a song of praise. We need to sing the joys of our life to family and friends. We need to realize that joy is infectious and we need to spread it as best we can. We need to rejoice each day with each other, enlisting our friends in being spreaders of joy so that our world can recover from the black funk it has been nursing since 9-11. We need to shout from the roof tops our joy in the coming of the Lord. We need to be twin towers with each other of our joy in the coming of the Lord.
