A Homily for the Third Sunday of Advent

​+ Truly, fully and consciously to participate in the Sacred Liturgy is to be immersed in the saving action of Our Lord Jesus Christ in His Church today—here and now, this morning—and, in the context of giving to Almighty God the fullest worship of which we are capable (and which He is due from we, His creatures), it is to hear His Word as it is spoken to us by His Church today. The liturgical texts—pre-eminently the readings from Sacred Scripture, but also the texts of the rites and chants which radiate them—are not the subject for antiquarian academic study during Mass. Rather, they are the voice of Almighty God speaking to each one of us, today, in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
 
The Epistle and Gospel and collect and introit and gradual, and all the liturgical texts and rites that have developed in the Church’s tradition are rich food for our mediation and contemplation as we face the varying circumstances in which we strive to persevere in fidelity to Christ today, tomorrow and beyond. They form us and instruct us and sustain us in God’s ways, which is why it is of the most critical spiritual and pastoral importance that they are not evacuated of their content or altered to suit the temperament of man at a given period of history. Our spiritual food must be the best possible if we are to have the strength and health we need successfully to combat the world, the flesh and the devil.
 
With this in mind, on this third Sunday of Advent, and throughout this week—in particular in our personal prayer and fasting on is Ember days this coming Wednesday, Friday and Saturday—I suggest that we can do no better than to create sufficient time and space to allow Almighty God to speak to us through the succinct Epistle of this Holy Mass from which this Sunday takes its traditional name “Gaudete”:  
 
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
 
In writing these words under the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit, St Paul was his customarily succinct self: “Rejoice!” we are told, twice. This can seem to be a facile, if not naïve injunction: there are very many reasons not to rejoice—our sins are no cause for celebration; the state of the Church and the world call us to prayer, fasting and penance, not jubilation; serious illness and material distress can lead us far from joy into despair; and, whether in the monastery, at home and in the family, or at work, we strive assiduously to build up all that is good, true and beautiful often to find that we have achieved little if anything for all our efforts. How, then, can we rejoice?
 
St Paul is clear: we are to rejoice “in the Lord”—and not in ourselves! If we spend our lives looking into a mirror we shall eventually become sick and depressed. If, however, we look to the Lord Whom, St Paul insists, “is at hand”, we need “have no anxiety about anything.” Rather, we are to make our needs known to Almighty God through prayer and supplication and thanksgiving. Then, through St Paul God the Holy Spirit teaches and assures us, “the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep [our] hearts and [our] minds in Christ Jesus.”
 
This is most certainly reason enough to rejoice! For whilst we cannot all that often rejoice in ourselves or others, in the secularised and politicised fragmenting Church, in the aggressively atheistic worldly powers, etc., we can truly rejoice in the Lord who gives us that peace, God’s peace, which passes all ordinary understanding. We can, and indeed we are taught today, we should, rejoice, because we have been given that pax inter spinas, that peace amongst the thorns of worldy and spiritual evil that encircle and entrap us, which keeps our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, enabling us to persevere each day in the tasks that are ours with supernatural hope, no matter what we must otherwise suffer.
 
The season of Advent daily insists that “the Lord is at hand.” In these days we must look to Him anew. If we have lost sight of Him through sin, if His peace is no longer within us because we have replaced it with the worship of something else that is not of God, if the supernatural hope given to us at Baptism has been squandered in the pursuit of worldly pleasures, we must remember that the Lord is indeed at hand. We must turn to Him anew in the Sacrament of Confession and receive those gifts once again from His merciful and loving hands stretched out in sacrifice for us on the Cross.
 
Then, indeed, we shall be able to rejoice. Then indeed “the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep [our] hearts and [our] minds in Christ Jesus.” For that gift, and for the courage to seek it with renewed fervour and devotion, particularly in this Ember week of Advent, let us beg Almighty God in this Holy Mass. +