We arrive this week at a kind of turn toward Christmas. Advent has its own pace — measured, expectant, leaning toward the horizon — but today the season deepens and brightens at the same time. This Sunday has a name all its own: Gaudete Sunday. The Sunday when we rejoice. The Sunday of the rose candle — if your Advent wreath includes such a thing. It is the liturgical hint that the long night is shading toward morning, that even in our waiting, joy is breaking in.
And this particular joy comes because the character of the season’s proclamation changes. Earlier in Advent we were listening for what will be—the future God is drawing toward us, the world as God intends it. But today the Gospel turns us toward what was and now is. We are invited to remember the promises made long before us, promises entrusted to prophets who lived and died without seeing their fulfillment. And we are invited to notice that God has kept those promises in the most ordinary of places and in the most ordinary of ways — so ordinary, in fact, that even the prophets themselves could scarcely have imagined it.
We are recalling the extraordinary work of God, wrapped in the ordinary. That is the Christian mystery we are preparing to celebrate. And it is a mystery that we witness again and again in Salvation History, and one that plays out still in our own day.
Into this shift of emphasis steps John the Baptist—no longer thundering from the riverbank, but speaking now with a quieter, plaintive tone. There is a bittersweetness folded into John’s question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” John is asking for reassurance. He is asking, from his prison cell, whether this long-awaited moment is truly at hand.
It must have been hard for him to believe it. Hard to imagine that in his day—under Roman occupation with Herod, the cruel client King ostensibly ruling over Israel at the leave of the Emperor, with the grinding realities of poverty and violence and dashed hopes — this was the moment God had chosen to act. Hard to imagine that the One the prophets longed for was already present among them, right there in the moment John voices his question, healing and reconciling, teaching and restoring. Hard to imagine that God’s work was unfolding not through spectacle or power, but through mercy given to the poor, sight restored to the blind, and hope rekindled in the hearts of ordinary people.
More (and a reference to Godel’s Theorem) in the sermon below.
You can view the sermon directly here.
