Homily for the Third Sunday of Advent

December 17, 2023
Saint Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Isaiah 61:1-2A, 10-11
(Resp) Luke 1:46-48, 49-50, 53-54
First Thessalonians 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28

On this Third Sunday of Advent called Gaudete Sunday, the prayers and readings of the Church’s Liturgy invite us to embrace the virtue of Hope, the Holy Spirit’s gift of the Fear of the Lord, and the Fruit of the Holy Spirit known as Joy. The word “Gaudete” is a command to rejoice. The word is taken from today’s reading from Saint Paul’s Epistle in which he commands the Thessalonians to rejoice always. We enter ever more deeply into the mystery of Advent when we remember that Saint Paul wrote these words while he was suffering imprisonment in a dark jail for witnessing to the light of the Truth of Christ. Saint Paul reveals to us that the joy we experience is beyond a sense of happiness confined by the terms of this world. Saint Paul continues to testify to the Eternal Light within the darkness of imprisonment. He testifies freely in both word and example while he is powerless to change his situation.

Today, on Gaudete Sunday, we find ourselves again in the darkness of this world and the Lord sends John the Baptist to draw us towards the light. We find ourselves imprisoned by fear and our powerlessness in the face of the dark deception that sin is inevitable because God seems not to exist, let alone care for us. The political polarization in our world seems to underscore a hopelessness that the world without God cannot resolve the problems that threaten human beings.

As Pope Benedict XVI once preached, “The Advent cry of hope then expresses from the outset and very powerfully, the full gravity of our state, of our extreme need of salvation. It is as if to say: we await the Lord not in the same way as a beautiful decoration upon a world already saved, but as the only way of liberation from a mortal danger and we know that He Himself, the Liberator, had to suffer and die to bring us out of this prison.”

Indispensable to this Advent hope for the Savior to liberate us is the Blessed Virgin Mary. The responsorial psalm for today’s liturgy is the Canticle of praise sung by Our Lady at the Visitation with her cousin Elizabeth: her Magnificat. Her canticle is a song of the theological virtue of hope. Her canticle is a song of the Holy Spirit’s gift of the Fear of the Lord. Her canticle is a song of the fruit of the Holy Spirit that is Joy. The Canticle of Mary reveals her to be unlike any other human being for she is filled with God’s Grace and preserved from all sin. This is revealed in her complete powerlessness, and her radical dependence on God in her response to His call at her Visitation.

The Blessed Virgin Mary sings with us today of the Fear of the Lord in her Canticle of Praise. “He has mercy on those who fear Him in every generation.” To have the Holy Spirit’s gift of the Fear of the Lord is not to be anxious. The Fear of the Lord is the attentiveness for us not to destroy the love of God on which our life is based. Fear of the Lord is the sense that we are accountable to God, and we do not want to fail Him because He loves us, and we are designed to love Him in return. The Fear of the Lord is the recognition that accompanies the hope that God can and will save us.

What is there about God that prompts us to hope? Saint Thomas Aquinas identified the motive for our hope as being God’s power, His omnipotence, His willingness to save us. It is our powerlessness to change ourselves that disposes us to hope in God’s power to change us. His willingness to save us prompts within us pure joy.

Christian fundamentalism proposes that faith alone in the merits of Christ is all that is necessary to offer us assurance of our salvation. This approach can be absent of joy and frequently can lead us to reduce the intimate relationship of friendship that God offers us to become a relationship where God is only useful for our own purposes. In response to this, the Council of Trent clearly taught that faith without hope cannot offer us a share in God’s life because hope is what links faith to charity, and this brings us joy. We cannot love God or others without hope in His power to save us.

Hope. Fear of the Lord. Joy. These enable us to join the Canticle of Mary, the Refuge of sinners. “All generations will call me blessed.” This means that the future brought about instrumentally by Mary’s “yes,” what is to come, belongs to God, it is in God’s hands, that it is God who conquers our enemies and brings us home to Him. “Nothing is impossible for God,” especially when we accept our powerlessness. It is only in doing so that we see the Eternal Light amidst darkness, that we enjoy liberation from our imprisonment, and that we become joyful within this valley of tears. “He has shown the strength of His arm and has scattered the proud in their conceit; He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich He has sent away empty; He has come to the help of His servant Israel for He has remembered His promise of mercy, the promise He made to our fathers, to Abraham, and His children forever.”