PASTORAL InstrucTION
FOR THE THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT
“Rejoice Always in the Lord”
December 14, 1986
This Sunday, the third in
Advent, is called Gaudete Sunday. The older ones among us will remember
that the Introit of this Sunday always began with the verse, “Gaudete in
Domino semper; iterum dico, gaudete! Dominus enim prope est”
(Phil 4:4-5). “Rejoice always in the Lord; again I say, rejoice! The Lord
is near!”
After two pastoral
instructions with rather “practical intent,” perhaps you will allow me this
week to share a meditation with you, a brief one, on the theme of Advent joy.
“Dominus enim prope est! The Lord is near!” The second
preface of the season rings the same note:
... in his love he has filled us with
joy,
as we prepare to celebrate his birth,
so that when he comes he may find us
watching in prayer,
our hearts filled with wonder and praise.
The joy of Advent is a joy
born of eager expectation and waiting: waiting for something good,
in fact, something wonderful. It is waiting for something sure. And what
is sure? That God, the God who once came in Jesus, will come to us again. The
joy of Advent springs from expecting him who came before “to build his tent in
our midst” as one of us, and who will come again and again. It is a joy that springs
from hope. When we were children, there was nothing we loved more than to
listen to stories. Perhaps you will remember, or your children might remind
you, that children love to hear the same stories again and again. (In fact, so
some mothers and fathers tell me, their children love to see the same
commercials on TV, as they come again and again with — for us — maddening
frquency!). The children know how the stories will run and how they will end:
the big bad wolf won’t be able to blow down the third little pig’s house of
stone; Rumpelstiltskin will inadvertently reveal his name and lose this claim
over the miller’s daughter’s child; the handsome prince will kiss Sleeping
Beauty and wake her up from slumber and she will marry him and live with him happily
ever after.
The listening children know
the endings well (they have heard them twenty times or more), but to them, each
time, each story speaks of the shape of a world with meaning, where evil
triumphs, but only for a while, for good at last will overcome it; where big
bad wolves may have their hour, but there is a happy ending for the good boy or
the good girl. God is in his heaven, and — at least in the end — all will turn
out right in the world.
There is something of all
this, in the waiting time that is Advent. Advent, it has been written, is a
time “when everybody is leaning forward to hear what will happen even though
they know what will happen and what will not happen, when they listen hard for
meaning, their meaning, and begin to hear, only faintly at first, the
beating of unseen wings” (Frederick Buechner).
Listen, here is how the advent-story starts its final
chapter:
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent
from God to a city of Galilee name Nazareth,
to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name
was Joseph,
of the house of David, and the virgin’s
name was Mary.
And he came to her and said, “Hail, full of grace,
the Lord is with you.” But she was
greatly troubled
at this saying, and considered in her
mind what sort
of greeting this might be.
And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid,
Mary, for you have found favor with God.
And behold, you will conceive in your womb and
bear a son, and you shall call his name
Jesus.”
And Mary said to the angel, “How can this be,
since I have no husband?” And the angel
said to her,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will
overshadow you;
and therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God” (Lk 1:26-35).
That is how the last chapter
of the Advent story begins. And even as the children listening to the tales of
childhood, we know how it will end. But each year we wait again, with bated
breath like children, and beating hearts of childhood, to hear the ending again
and again: man-child born in Bethlehem, and the angels filling the sky with
their bright wings, and the clear night air with their songs, and the shepherds
hurrying to the stable, “to see this thing that has happened, which the Lord
has made known to us” (Lk 2:15). Eagerly we bend forward, to hear the story
again, and “we listen hard for its meaning, our meaning,” the
meaning for us of this wonderful thing that happened and happens each year once
more, “which the Lord has made known to us.”
And what is its meaning? What
does the story say, about the very meaning of our lives? About what God means
for human history and human society?
There is an article which
appeared more than ten years ago, in an American newspaper, which I have read
and re-read often, because it seems to me to give us one good way to get at the
meaning of the Christmas story: one good way, this Gaudete Sunday, to catch the
heart of Advent joy. Let me share with you today:
WHAT IF...
Still...
Jesus was crazy. He came into the world
with the nutty idea that human beings could love one
another...
Peace
on earth, indeed! Maybe Jesus should have stayed home. He was wrong. We cannot
love one another.
The
best we can do is keep the levels of hatred
low enough so we don’t exterminate one another
before we all die ...
It
was a great idea, of course. Too bad it didn’t work.
Still...
What
if he wasn’t crazy?
What
if he was right?
What
if it is possible to love one another?
What
if the lion can lie down with the lamb?
What
if Arab and Jew, Protestant and Catholic,
black and white, young and old, male and female,
can love one another without fear, without hatred,
without death and destruction?
What if the crib scene is what
the world is really
all about and everything else is phony?
What would it be like if Jesus
knew the way
things really were?
What if life does triumph over
death,
light over darkness,
good over evil,
love over hate,
comedy over tragedy...?
What if...
(an excerpt from Andrew Greeley)
“What if the crib scene is
what the world is really all about and everything else is phony?” What if it is
possible — really possible — for us to love one another? To love here, in the
most down-to-earth of ways, means not “to love mankind” — in the abstract, from
a distance, but people right around me, the ones I find hardest to care about."You
love God as much as the one you love the least,” Dorothy Day
used to tell people. To love here means also, above all at Christmas time, to
love those whom “the world loves least.” “Deal your bread to the hungry and
take those without shelter into your house.”
Allow me to end with a Hasidic
tale, which is well-known to most of you (I know), but which bears re-telling,
just as the old fairy tales of our childhood, and the Christmas story we all
love the best.
“How can we determine the hour
of dawn,
when the night ends and the day begins?”
When from a distance you can
distinguish
between a dog and a sheep?”
Suggested
one of the students.
“No,” was the answer of the
rabbi.
“Is it when one can
distinguish between
a fig tree and a grapevine?”
Asked a
second student.
“No,” the rabbi said.
“Please tell us the answer
then,’’ said the students.
“It is then,” the wise teacher
said,
“when
you can look into the face of a human being
and
you have enough light to recognize in him your brother.
Up until then it is the night
and the darkness
which is still with us.”
Advent joy, we said, is that
joy which springs from hope: the hope at
last our “What if...?” will become “It’s true: Bethlehem is what the world is really all about, and everything
else is phony.” But we will know this, only when we have learned through
deeds the rabbi’s lesson, and the night and the darkness have
become light around us.
Listen to these words, from a
sixteenth century monk:
The gloom of the world is but
a shadow.
Behind it, yet within reach,
is joy,
There is a
radiance and a glory in the darkness,
could we but see, and to see, we have only to look.
I beseech you to look.
Gaudete in Domino semper; iterum dico, gaudete! Dominus enim prope est.
“Rejoice always in the Lord, I say again, rejoice! For the Lord is near!”
(Sgd.) + JAIME L. CARDINAL SIN, D.D.
Archbishop of Manila
December 14, 1986
