Did Someone Say ‘Rejoice’?

Last updated on: December 14, 2014 at 12:39 pm by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Did Someone Say ‘Rejoice’? 2014-12-14T12:39:22-05:00 Kathryn Jean Lopez

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Today, the third Sunday of Advent, is known as Gaudete Sunday, Latin for “Joy.” This is a day for rejoicing! We light the pink candle on our Advent wreathes to remember who we are: a people of joy.

Our hearts and our homes should always be houses of joy.

Sister Aemiliana Löhr, a German Benedictine who died in 1972, helps us better understand the reason for our Advent joy:

The Lord is near. He is not to come after thousands of years, not to be sought in faraway places; He is here among us. Our Advent is not the longing search of mankind before the Incarnation. The Messiah, Savior God, awaited by Jews and pagans alike, has come. God has redeemed His people, and not withdrawn from them again. He is here, in His Church; His living breath, His divine life are present in every one of the baptized; all who believed have His strength and love from which to live; every one of us who takes part in His holy sacrifice grows in this fire-like undying life.

Each of us knows and experiences every instant that “we live and move and have our being in Him” that we can utter no good word, entertain no good thought, look not for one instant with the vision faith accords, without Him, the living Christ within us.

To be sure, He is the coming one as well. Each day His appearance is a new one, in His Word, His writings, in the guidance His Church gives, in her sacrifice and sacraments, the feasts of her holy year. But all of that is one eternal presence. He is in us, and He comes to us, always to be with us.

That is the joy we have to sing: the Lord is near….

Because He is near, because she is full of Him, she cannot remain alone in her joy; the Church will rejoice with her children, the soul with all the rest of the Christians, in whom the Lord dwells as He does in her. Rejoice, the Lord is near, she calls. Realize what a happiness you have, to be changed at His hands, to live from Him, to have Him nearer to you than your own body.
Because Christ’s love dwells in her, she has a mind for those who are not near to Him. She has mercy on them, would bring them to the happiness of nearness to him.

(Thank you to last year’s Dec. Magnificat for the passage.

From a homily:

A Christian who is not joyful is an oxymoron. If we’re not joyful, we make the good news a lie. If we were really deeply joyful, on the other hand, the world would be busting down the doors of our church to get in. The world should be invading our church on Christmas, and the Lord wants us to be ready, bursting with enthusiastic joy. What I’m talking about is not some counterfeit type of outgoing, giggly, unrealistic mania, but a deep overflowing sense of God’s love and life within that overflows toward others. This is possible. The Lord would not be calling us to something that, with His help, is impossible. But we just have to say yes and correspond to God’s plans.

Why rejoice? From another homily:

Why should we rejoice? Because God has revealed himself to us in Christ and this revelation is a “game changer” for how we understand who God is and how we understand who we are.

How so?

In Jesus Christ we see that God is not just some kind of universal force, abstract concept, or power that exists in utter indifference to his creation.

Instead, God is a living, divine person who invites us to know him and share a relationship with him. God makes this relationship accessible to us through Christ. By accepting a human nature from us, he invites us to accept a share in his divine nature. In the humanity of Christ, he makes a kind of bridge by which we can have access to his divinity.

Why would he bother? I mean let’s admit it, while some of us might be interesting, we really aren’t all that interesting. And besides, none of us has anything to offer to God that he doesn’t already have. God doesn’t need us.

And yet God becomes man in Christ. God accepts a human nature and lives a real human life. He could have just barked orders at us or dazzled us with terrifying signs and wonders, but he decided he would meet us face to face and speak to us as one speaks to a friend. Why?

We Christians believe that in Jesus Christ we see the answer to why God bothered and that answer is because God loves us, and more than that, because God is love, and even though we are undeserving of his love, and for the most part, unwilling to accept his love, he still loves us- and to demonstrate his love, he reveals himself in Christ and then he acts to remove from our way the obstacles that inhibit our knowing and loving him. In Christ, God forgives our sins, defeats the devil, rescues us from the power of death. God even acts in Christ to save us from ourselves.

This is what the whole Bible is about. This is what the Gospel is all about. It is not a book of life lessons, but a book of extraordinary revelations. It is not a self-help strategy, but how God acted strategically to help us when we could not help ourselves.

It is for this reason, that God became man in Christ, that the Apostle Paul insists that we should rejoice.

We are given the great gift of the Advent season to remember our joy in preparing for celebrate the birthday of our Savior, letting Him stretch our hearts in love for one another, as He wants to enter our hearts more deeply, healing and renewing, replenishing and strengthening.

When he greeted the crowds in St. Peter’s Square in Rome last year on Gaudete Sunday, our holy father, Pope Francis, explained that “the joy of the Gospel is not just any joy.” He described it as consisting in ”knowing one is welcomed and loved by God.” He invited us to let Jesus “strengthen the weak hands, to make firm the feeble knees, to be strong and to fear not, because our God always shows us the greatness of His mercy.”

Ours is not a superficial joy, but a true one that “remains even amid trial, even amid suffering,” because it “permeates the depths of the person who entrusts himself to the Lord and confides in him.”

Go to Jesus this Advent. Let Him help you, let him heal you and those you encounter through you. (Don’t let Advent go without Confession!) Trust Him and let Him show you that He is our joy and “His faithful love is inexhaustible!” Do not be distant from Him.

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God Makes the Inconceivable Conceivable

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December 16, 2014 U.S. Sister Talks about Freedom, Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Joy

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