Fr Cuthbert Brennan OSB
This third Sunday of Advent is called Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin for joy but it’s hard to be joyful when the world seems so full of violence and fear. There are many wildernesses in our world today, the refugee crisis, the places of conflict, the environmental crisis and it is into these very spaces that we are invited to be heralds of joy. John the Baptist who we meet in the gospel this morning shows us how to live as someone who recognises and has a profound understanding of the joy of God and the hope of restoration that Jesus brings.
The gospel of John uses a different title for John the Baptist. He’s called a witness, a witness for the light. And the text this morning tells us more about who John wasn’t than who he was; he wasn’t the light. The religious leaders question John because they want to put him in some pigeonhole, they’re determined to place John in their preconception of what religion ought to be. They want to place John within their conventional expectations, they want to see him fit into their hopes for the future of Israel. No matter what they suggest,
Messiah, Elijah, a prophet, John’s answer is No, no, no, I’m not that, no! The only positive thing John says about himself is that he is a voice. “I am the voice crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.”
I am God’s loudspeaker, I am the smell of coffee that wakes you up in the morning, I am that alarm bell in the school at 7.30 that shatters your sleep. I am the voice that has only one thing to tell you, the light is coming, “I am not the light. I’m a witness to the light, I’m a voice, I’m someone who points to the light, I’m somebody who tells you that the light is coming but I am not the light.”
To the religious experts who do what religious experts do, they define, classify, characterise and pigeon hole God, John tells them and us “You do not know, you cannot define, you do not know the light that is coming into the world, into the darkness.” At this point in our Advent journey we are told that our hopes will be fulfilled but not necessarily fulfilled as we expect, by the light that dawns to our darkness. Our expectations are going to be met but not in the way we expect. An important question to ask at his point in the Advent journey is “For what am I hoping for Christmas?” It’s an important question because, like some of those people who questioned John, we may miss something so fragile and mysterious as the Light of Christ if we are too full of our explanations, too full of our definitions and expectations.
For what are you hoping? Well, if you’re like a lot of people around here, maybe you’re not sure. What brought you to church on this third Sunday of Advent? Maybe you didn’t even know it was the third Sunday of Advent. Maybe, like the rest of us you are still searching for God. And John the Witness, says that’s ok. An open heart may be a lot better than one that is full of definitions and preconceptions, that there’s no room left for any light. This Sunday, with John, let us set aside our hopes and expectations and simply let the light dawn among us. Let us admit that we are in the dark and let us allow the light to enter our darkness.
When he began his ministry, one of the problems for Jesus was that people thought they knew how the Messiah should act and what the Messiah should say. And when Jesus didn’t do what they expected, they rejected him and crucified him. In these last days of Advent let us cultivate a receptivity for surprise, wonder, the shock of God who is not the God we thought we knew, and not even the God we thought we wanted. Let us be open to encountering God in the person of Jesus Christ this Christmas that we may stand as witnesses to the light, the light coming into the world, the light that the darkness of the world has not, despite over 2000 years, overcome.