Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Agnes Church, New York, NY
Third Sunday of Advent, Extraordinary Form
December 12, 2021
Phil 4:4-7, Jn 1:19-28
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- Like we do each Advent, today we go out to meet Saint John the Baptist at the Jordan River. There the one who identifies himself as voice of one crying out in the desert summons us to make straight the paths of the Lord, to lower the mountains of our pride, to fill up the valleys of spiritual minimalism, to straighten our crooked ways and smooth our rough ones. People were walking for 20-50 miles to meet John out in the middle of nowhere at Bethany across the Jordan, some out of curiosity to see this man dressed in camel hair eating wild locusts and honey, some to investigate whether he was the Messiah, others sent by the religious authorities to evaluate him, most to listen to him with sincerity, be converted by him and prepare for the coming of the Messiah whom he was announcing.
- We go out to meet him not out of curiosity, or assessment, or suspicion, but out of spiritual need, to receive his help in bringing us to converstion. To convert means more than to eliminate a bad habit. The Greek word for conversion is metanoete, which means to rethink and question one’s whole way of living, judging it not according to polls and the lives of celebrities but seeing our whole life through the eyes of God and making the love of God and others the measure and the criteria of our life. To convert means resolving to live the way Jesus Christ lived and taught us to live. It ultimately means a death and resurrection in which we die to the old Adam and begin to live a new life with Christ by means of the forgiveness of sins gratuitously bestowed in the Sacraments of Baptism and Penance.
- One of the characteristics of that new life being offered, of the truly Christian life with Jesus, is joy. This Sunday the Church celebrates Gaudete Sunday, taken from Saint Paul’s command to the Philippians which we hear in the second reading, “Gaudete semper in Domino,” “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice.” Elsewhere he said the same thing to the Christians in Thessalonika: “This is God’s will for you: rejoice always!” (1 Thess 5:16). Our vocation, our fundamental Christian mission, is to rejoice. To highlight the importance of this calling, the priest uses rose vestments and we light a rose rather than a purple candle on the Advent wreath according to medieval color schemes for joy. A Christian who is not joyful is not just an oxymoron but a false prophet. If we’re not joyful, we imply that the “good news” is a lie. On the other hand, if we are really filled with joy, the world will eventually bust down the doors of our churches to get in, because our family, our friends, our neighbors, are made for joy, don’t have it, and consciously or unconsciously are seeking it in the midst of short-lived technological pleasures that can never deliver it. If they see it in us, they’ll hunger to know why, and they’ll follow us to the source of our joy, who is Christ Jesus. One of the biggest challenges facing the Church, Pope Francis has been saying, is that many Christians do not live the faith we joy. That’s why in 2013 he wrote a beautiful exhortation called the Joy of the Gospel, since he said that joy “fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus, who accept his offer of salvation [and] are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness.” But we must really encounter Jesus at the depth at which he seeks to meet us.
- One of the problems for many of us is that we relate to Jesus mainly as a moral teacher rather than one who said to us, “I have come so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be made complete.” Many of us are not accustomed to thinking of Jesus as the most joyful person who ever lived. We don’t imagine him smiling or laughing. Many times we picture Jesus as he was depicted in the 1977 Franco Zeffirelli film Jesus of Nazareth in which Robert Powell portrayed Jesus in a way in which Jesus seldom smiled and was, at least to me, rather lifeless. Back in 1975, Saint Pope Paul VI wrote a beautiful exhortation entitled, appropriately, Gaudete in Domino, taken from Saint Paul’s words this Sunday, in which he went on at length about Jesus’ contagious joy.
- Paul VI wrote that Jesus “experienced our joys. He … celebrated a whole range of human joys, those simple daily joys within the reach of everyone. … He admires the birds of heaven, the lilies of the field. He immediately grasps God’s attitude towards creation at the dawn of history. He willingly extols the joy of the sower and the harvester, the joy of the man who finds a hidden treasure, the joy of the shepherd who recovers his sheep or of the woman who finds her lost coin, the joy of those invited to the feast, the joy of a marriage celebration, the joy of the father who embraces his son returning from a prodigal life, and the joy of the woman who has just brought her child into the world. For Jesus, these joys are real because for Him they are the signs of the spiritual joys of the kingdom of God: the joy of people who enter this kingdom return there or work there, the joy of the Father who welcomes them. And for His part Jesus Himself manifests His satisfaction and His tenderness when He meets children wishing to approach Him, a rich young man who is faithful and wants to do more, friends who open their home to Him, like Martha, Mary and Lazarus. His happiness is above all to see the Word accepted, the possessed delivered, a sinful woman or a publican like Zacchaeus converted, a widow taking from her poverty and giving. He even exults with joy when He states that the little ones have the revelation of the kingdom that remains hidden from the wise and clever. Yes, because Christ was ‘a man like us in all things but sin,’ He accepted and experienced affective and spiritual joys, as a gift of God. And He did not rest until ‘to the poor he proclaimed the good news of salvation…and to those in sorrow, joy.’”
- Saint Paul VI doesn’t stop there, but says we have to “understand properly the secret of the unfathomable joy which dwells in Jesus and which is special to Him. … It is by reason of the inexpressible love by which He knows that He is loved by His Father. When He is baptized on the banks of the Jordan, this love, which is present from the first moment of His Incarnation, is manifested: ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on you.’ This certitude is inseparable from the consciousness of Jesus.” Jesus’ joy came from his abiding in the love of the Father and Jesus wants to communicate to us that joy by helping us to know and experience that love. At the same time, however, Paul VI makes plain that this joy is not some spiritual cotton candy. This Christ-like joy, he said, is a “demanding joy,” saying it begins with the beatitudes. People today think joy comes from being rich but Jesus says it comes from spiritual poverty; the world says it comes from comedy, but Jesus says it comes through mourning; the world says it comes from having everyone fear starting a conflict with you, but Jesus says it comes through being meek and a peacemaker; the world says it comes from having all of your sexual fantasies and even perversions fulfilled, whereas Jesus indicates it flows from being pure in heart; the world says it flows from being popular and admired, but Jesus says real joy comes from being persecuted, reviled and hated on his account. That’s the path for us to “rejoice and be glad,” for our reward in heaven will be great. Christian joy is a demanding joy. We see this in Jesus’ own joy. “In a mysterious way,” Saint Paul VI writes, “Christ Himself accepts death at the hands of the wicked and death on the cross, … but the Father has not allowed death to keep Him in its power. … This is why the disciples were confirmed in an ineradicable joy when they saw the Lord on Easter evening.” And so Paul VI draws a conclusion: “The joy of the kingdom brought to realization can only spring from thesimultaneous celebration of the death and resurrection of the Lord. … Neither trials nor sufferings have been eliminated from this world, but they take on a new meaning in the certainty of sharing in the redemption wrought by the Lord and of sharing in His glory. … Here below this joy will always include to a certain extent the painful trial of a woman in labor and a certain apparent abandonment, like that of the orphan… but the disciples’ sadness, which is according to God and not according to the world, will be promptly changed into a spiritual joy that no one will be able to take away from them.”
- When we have true Christian joy, no one can take it away from us. But we can squander it. Saint Paul VI takes up two ways that we do that are important for us to ponder.
- He says the first way is through seeking to find our joy in material things. “Technological society,” he noted, “has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy. For joy comes from another source. It is spiritual. Money, comfort, hygiene and material security are often not lacking; and yet boredom, depression and sadness unhappily remain the lot of many. These feelings sometimes go as far as anguish and despair, which apparent carefreeness, the frenzies of present good fortune and artificial paradises cannot assuage.” CS Lewis once wrote inSurprised by Joy, “I doubt whether anyone who has tasted [joy] would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then, joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.” We can’t find joy through things. We can’t find joy through winning the lottery. We can’t find joy by spending the rest of our life in “artificial paradises” like Disney World. All of those pleasures have expiration dates whereas joy endures. This is a very important lesson for us to note as we prepare for Christmas because many of us spend so much time shopping for Christmas presents for those we love, but in doing so at most we’re giving them something that will please them for a time, but never help those we love become happy. Eventually the new sneakers, or bicycle, or x-box, gadgets or clothes will no longer captivate and they’ll just be on to the new thing, constantly searching in them for joy but never finding anything more than pleasure. Out of love for those we care about, we need to rethink how we approach Christmas so that we might lead them to joy. How would we do that? Perhaps we might give them a book that would engage them to grow deeper in the faith. Perhaps we might take them on a pilgrimage to a beautiful shrine or sanctuary or a mission trip. Perhaps we might give them some old fashioned T-I-M-E, so that they might be able to catch from us a little of the contagious joy that is supposed to mark us as Christians. But rather than feeding our materialistically addicted appetites, we might help stoke their hunger for the things that are conducive to joy.
- The second way we squander or prevent joy, Saint Paul VI, said is through secularism, through living as if God didn’t exist, through abiding in spiritual worldliness rather than with God. When this happens to man, he says, “the meaning of life escapes him, … he is no longer sure of himself or of his transcendent calling and destiny. He has desacralized the universe and now he is desacralizing humanity; he has at times cut the vital link that joined him to God.” We strip God from our worldview, we eliminate him from our daily life, we eliminate him from our understanding of what it means to be human, and when this happens we lose the essential foundation for true and lasting joy. This is why it’s so serious when aggressive secularists in government, the courts, schools and culture try to pretend as if God doesn’t exist and to get everyone to pretend with them. In doing so, we lose the consciousness of God and his love that is essential for our experiencing joy. We also to a large degree lose the capacity for normal human joys. Instead, we substitute pleasures, but these pleasures can’t sustain. Eventually we want bigger and bigger thrills to keep us entertained and the little things of life no longer cut it for us. This is one of the biggest plagues of our age and leads to a deep restlessness.
- That’s why Advent is so important. In Advent, we contemplate deeply the meaning of Jesus’ incarnation. We prepare for Emmanuel, God-with-us, God who comes to bring us joy.
- One of the greatest models of joy is Our Lady. On this day in which we remember 490 years ago the appearances of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Saint Juan Diego, we recall Mary’s joy. She was full of joy because she was full of grace and full of God, because the Lord was with her. Later in her Magnificat, which is a hymn of joy, she exulted, “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior” and then gave reasons: because he has looked on her humility, done great things for her, extended his mercy from generation to generation, exalted the humble, filled the hungry, and faithfully helped Israel as he promised. We have the same perennial reasons for joy. And Mary as “cause of our joy” intercedes for us. This Gaudete Sunday is an opportunity for us to receive that help, which is constitutive to our Christian vocation.
- The greatest means of all to be filled with joy here on earth is the encounter we have with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. We call what we’re doing the “celebration” of the Mass because it’s supposed to be a truly joy-filled feast. It’s at Mass that God comes to speak with us. It’s at Mass that God comes to be with us. It’s at Mass that God comes to hear our prayers. It’s at Mass that God comes to feed us and sanctify us from the inside out. In Holy Communion, we receive Joy-in-the-Flesh, the one who came so that his joy might be in us and our joy may be brought to perfection. God’s desire to enter into a Holy Communion with us, the fruit of divine love, is the most profound reason of all to act on St. Paul’s words today, to “rejoice always.”
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Philippians
Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! Your kindness should be known to all. The Lord is near. Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
The continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. John
This is the testimony of John. When the Jews from Jerusalem sent priests and Levites [to him] to ask him, “Who are you?” he admitted and did not deny it, but admitted, “I am not the Messiah.” So they asked him, “What are you then? Are you Elijah?” And he said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” He answered, “No.” So they said to him, “Who are you, so we can give an answer to those who sent us? What do you have to say for yourself?” He said: “I am “the voice of one crying out in the desert, “Make straight the way of the Lord,”’ as Isaiah the prophet said.” Some Pharisees were also sent. They asked him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah or Elijah or the Prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water; but there is one among you whom you do not recognize, the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.” This happened in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing.
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