This is Gaudete Sunday, which means in one word: Rejoice! I think as we delve a little into the
readings we will see how apropos this title is for describing the Third Sunday
of Advent! The first reading from Isaiah
opens with this announcement: ‘The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me’. It follows with a kind of delineation of what
this anointing of the Spirit means. And
all of this is pointing to the Coming One: Christ. The second reading from St. Paul’s letter to
the Thessalonians gives an orientation for our lives in the context of the One
who is coming: first, ‘rejoice
always…pray without ceasing…in all things give thanks’: doing this the reading tells us is the will
of God in Christ. Then comes the
warning: ‘Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophetic utterances. Test everything: retain what is good. Refrain from every kind of evil’. Now if we are to heed the voice of John the
Baptist who is crying out in the wilderness, again on this third Sunday of
Advent, we have in concrete terms what we are to both heed and do!
‘Do not quench the Spirit’:
as I have already said in an earlier chapter talk the Spirit is hovering
over our lives, ready to birth forth the NEW of God in our lives. Do we even notice the Spirit hovering? ‘Rejoice’, ‘pray’, ‘give thanks’: what if these three realities were our
default? What if even one of them each
day was our default? It feels to me that
if we anchor our lives around praying, giving thanks, rejoicing we have found
the medicine that keeps us open to receive this Divine birth and to live from
this newness that the Coming One longs to grace us with.
Another way of helping us receive God’s gift is to ponder: How do I quench the Spirit? I encourage each one of us to give time this
week to note down some ways I do this, for just doing this little task (this
inner work) will open us more and keep us more attentive to the new gesture of
God hovering in and around our hearts.
The next phrase is even stronger: ‘Do not despise prophetic
utterances’. There is one prophetic
utterance, which tells us what Advent is all about: God is coming…in spite of our selves…in spite
of our fears, our doubts, our hopelessness, our negativity. Are we ready and willing to pray the grace to
believe…to live into this reality that our God is coming?
A final comment on the Thessalonians reading: ‘Test everything: retain what is good. Refrain from what is evil’. The heart is complex…it is the receptacle for
this new birth…still it has the potential to not serve the good. ‘Test everything…’: this is not about being over scrupulous; it
simply means to reflect upon our intentions as they come up, to sort through
those different voices that pull us one way or another: am I doing this act out
of jealousy, out of hurt, out of rebellion because no one cares? We could all add on different scenarios that
come up in our human relationships. And
still the Spirit hovers over our lives.
God will not disappoint. We
rejoice because this is the season of God’s immense gift to us and to our
world; we pray, even more, so as to be open to receive and to be bearers of
this gift; we give thanks because we are humbled, as we already ‘know’, we
already feel these stirrings of life, of the Coming One, who will take root
even more in the ‘hodie’ of our
lives. Amen.
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