3rd Sunday Advent :: Op-stjoseph.org

3RD Sunday of Advent 12-16-07 Scripture Readings First Isaiah 35:1-6a, 10 Second James 5:7-10 Gospel Matthew 11:2-11

Prepared by: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P. 1. Subject Matter •

Gaudete Sunday: “The desert will rejoice with joyful song…. Those whom the Lord has ransomed will return…crowned with everlasting joy; they will meet with joy and gladness.”

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The connection between “desire” and “joy” - the role of desire in our sanctification.

2. Exegetical Notes •

“See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient” – “Be patient not only in the face of outrageous injustice, but toward the ordinary trials of life” (JBC).

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“Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” – “The very security of disbelief as well as that of orthodoxy is probed deeply by the New Testament, to see whether it still contains an openness to faith. If faith is not simply assent to a proposition but life with God, then it can live only by increasing and decreasing, in experiences that strengthen or endanger it” (E. Schweizer).

3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church •

27 The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself.

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1718 The Beatitudes respond to the natural desire for happiness. This desire is of divine origin: God has placed it in the human heart in order to draw man to the One who alone can fulfill it.

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1765 Love causes a desire for the absent good and the hope of obtaining it; this movement finds completion in the pleasure and joy of the good possessed.

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1843 By hope we desire, and with steadfast trust await from God, eternal life and the graces to merit it.

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2557 "I want to see God" expresses the true desire of man.

4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities •

St. Gregory the Great: “If John the Baptist had spoken more fully he might have said, ‘Since you thought it worthy of yourself to be born for humanity, say whether you will also think it worthy of yourself to die for humanity. In this way I, who have been the herald of your birth, will also be the herald of your death. I will announce your arrival in the nether world as the One who is to come, just as I have already announced it on earth.”

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St. Jerome: “The kingdom of heaven is Jesus the Christ himself, who exhorts all people to repentance and draws them to himself by love.”

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St. Thomas Aquinas: “A man’s life consists in the affection that principally sustains him and in which he finds his greatest satisfaction.”

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St. Thomas Aquinas: “Men are ordained by the divine Providence towards a higher good than human fragility can experience in the present life. That is why it was necessary for the human mind to be called to something higher than the human reason here and now can reach, so that it would thus learn to desire something and with zeal tend towards something that surpasses the whole state of the present life.”

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St. Thomas Aquinas: “The desire for joy is inherently stronger than the fear of sadness.”

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St. Catherine of Siena: ““So your desire is an infinite thing. Were it not, could I be served by any finite thing, no virtue would have value or life. For I who am infinite God want you to serve me with what is infinite, and you have nothing infinite except your soul’s love and desire….I am infinite Good and I therefore require of you infinite desire. It is right, then that you should build your foundation by slaying and annihilating your self-will. Then, with your will subjected to mine, you would give me tender, flaming, infinite desire, seeking my honor and the salvation of souls. In this way you would feast at the table of holy desire—a desire that is never scandalized either in yourself or your neighbors, but finds joy in everything and reaps all the different kinds of fruit that I bestow on the soul.”

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Blessed Angela of Foligno: “When the soul is told: ‘What do you want?’ it can respond: ‘I want God.’ God then tells it, ‘I am the one making you feel that desire.’ Until it reaches this point, the soul’s desire is not true or integral. This form of desire is granted to the soul by a grace by which it knows that God is within it, and that it is in companionship with God. This gift is to have a desire, now a unified one, in which it feels that it loves God in a way analogous to the true love with which God has loved us. The soul feels God merging with it and becoming its companion.”

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C.S. Lewis: “Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling…of that something which you where born desiring, and which… you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it— tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “Hear at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing

we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all….The thing itself has… always… summoned you out of yourself. And if you will not go out of yourself to follow it,… the desire itself will evade you.” •

Oscar V. Milosz: “Ah, how do I fill up this emptiness in life? What can I do? For the desire is always there, stronger, and madder than ever. It is like a fire in the sea that blasts its flame into the deep universal black emptiness. It is a desire to embrace the possibilities.”

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Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P.: “It is here, under this intimate flash where the good shines forth, that the desire for happiness is revealed in its best light. By excluding this desire from morality, we have deformed it and painted a false picture of it, because the desire for happiness is itself a spark of the divine image within us.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke: “Why don’t you think of Him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive…. What keeps you from living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful?... Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin… Celebrate Christmas in this devout feeling, that perhaps he needs this very anguish of yours in order to begin…. Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.”

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Fr. Julian Carron: “To be engaged with one’s own humanity means to take seriously this heart, this inexorable desire for happiness and fulfillment…. Why should we engage ourselves with this heart? Because this heart is the fundamental criterion with which we approach things; it is the ultimate criterion for discovering the truth of man, for recognizing what is true.”

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Fr. Julian Carron: “If the link with the real is in crisis, then the ‘I’ is not awakened, and so you find yourself saying, ‘And what if there is no desire? What if I don’t have this desire?’ Don’t complain that the desire is not there; what is in crisis is the relationship with the real, and if you can’t find the way to rebuild the relationship with the real, there will be no more desire. When an individual is reawakened within his being by the Presence, the Attraction, the Awe, then he is grateful and joyful.”

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Msgr. Massimo Camisasca: “Joy is born of the judgment that we are on the right path, and of the perception of an Other in whom we find all our strength…. The absence of joy means that the person has been uprooted, whether through a lack of awareness (the loss of memory) or through disorientation (the loss of self in things, in anxieties, or in responsibilities). There is a link between joy and the experience of one’s own usefulness…. If joy is certitude that the final plenitude is already present here and now, the sense of “usefulness” is the desire that this plenitude transform life…. Usefulness is recognizing the place that the Master Artisan assigns to our life; it is following him, following his indications, and entering into his sign. The greatest usefulness of our lives lies in entering the place Christ has created, so that this might be of use to the world. He died ‘for us men and for our salvation.’ This is why obedience is joy; it is the sure and transcendent cause of joy.”

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Robert Louis Stevenson: “True realism always and everywhere is…to find out where joy resides, and give it voice…For to miss the joy is to miss all.”

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Msgr. Luigi Giussani: “Joy is the certitude that comes into the world for the fact of having been touched by the Mystery.”

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Msgr. Romano Guardini: “What a tremendous thought it is: heaven on the way to meet me, relentlessly advancing toward me, and God’s eye is upon me. And to think of the mightiness of the will behind it! The monumental strength of that desire!”

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars •

The “Christmas grace” of St. Therese of Lisieux - see The Story of a Soul, Chapter 5: Therese received the grace of leaving behind her childhood and the grace of her complete conversion; the episode ends with Therese stating: “I experienced a great desire to work for the conversion of sinners, a desire I hadn’t felt so intensely before.”

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Jacques Fesch, a convicted murderer who experienced a profound conversion to the faith before his death by execution in 1957, wrote from his prison cell: “Be like the clay which the divine potter can shape as he wills. The one who abandons himself to God in this way no longer has a heart of flesh in his breast, but a ball of fire. And I assure you that when the Lord begins to kindle the fire of his love, his victim is quick to cry for mercy, for the joy is beyond our human strength to bear.”

6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI •

“If I can be convinced that the one who loves me is close to me, even in situations of suffering, the joy that remains in the depth of my heart is ever greater than all sufferings.”

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“To listen to Christ…. To listen to him in the Word, preserved in Sacred Scripture. To listen to him in the very events of our lives, trying to read in them the messages of providence. To listen to him, finally, in our brothers, especially in the little ones and the poor, for whom Jesus himself asked our concrete love. To listen to Christ and to obey his voice. This is the only way that leads to joy and love.”

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“Christianity is, by its very nature, joy—the ability to be joyful. The ‘Rejoice!’ with which it begins expresses its whole nature. By its very essence, by its very nature, Christian belief is ‘glad tidings’…deep joy of the heart is also the true prerequisite for a sense of humor, and thus humor is, in a certain sense, the measure of faith.”

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“Man’s appetite for joy, the ultimate quest for which the human being wanders restlessly from place to place, only makes sense if he can face the question of death… Nothing can make man laugh unless there is an answer to the question of death. And conversely, if there is an answer to death, it will make genuine joy possible.”

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“Between the Son of God-made-flesh and his Church there is a profound, unbreakable and mysterious continuity by which Christ is present today in his people. He is always contemporary with us, he is always contemporary with the Church. And his very presence in the community, in which he himself is always with us, is the reason for our joy. Yes, Christ is with us, the Kingdom of God is coming.”

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“Worship is the context in which we can discover joy, the liberating, victorious Yes to life.”

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“Faith gives joy. When God is not there, the world becomes desolate, and everything becomes boring, and everything is completely unsatisfactory. It’s easy to see today how a world empty of God is also increasingly consuming itself, how it has become a wholly joyless world. The great joy comes from the fact that there is this great love, and that is the essential message of faith. You are unswervingly loved. This also explains why Christianity spread first predominantly among the weak and suffering. To that extent it can be said that the basic element of Christianity is joy…. It is joy in the proper sense. A joy that exists together with a difficult life and also makes this life livable.”

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“Jesus Christ draws to himself the heart of each person, enlarges it and fills it with joy that moves and attracts the human person to free adoration, to bow with heartfelt respect before the Truth he has encountered.”

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“Something of the beauty of Advent can be found even in difficulty. Illness and suffering can therefore, like a great joy, also be a personal Advent—a visit by God who wants to enter my life and turn toward me.”

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“It is in fact true, is it not, that all joy which arises independently of Christ or contrary to his will proves insufficient and only thrusts the person back down into a confusion in which, when all is said and done, he can find no lasting joy? Only with Christ has authentic joy made its appearance and that the only thing of ultimate importance in our lives is to learn to see and know Christ, the God of grace, the light and joy of the world. Our joy will be genuine only when it no longer depends on things that can be stripped from us and destroyed and when it has its basis rather in those innermost depths of our existence which no worldly power can take from us. Every external loss should turn us back to these innermost depths and better dispose us for our true life…To celebrate Advent means to bring to life within ourselves the hidden Presence of God. It takes place to the extent that we travel the path of conversion and change our cast of mind by turning from the visible to the invisible. As we travel this path, we learn to see the miracle of grace; we learn that there can be no more luminous source of joy for human beings and the world than the grace that has appeared in Christ. The world is not a futile confusion of drudgery and pain, for all the distress the world contains is supported in the arms of merciful love; it is caught up in the forgiving and saving graciousness of our God.”

7. Other Considerations •

The reality that unites the blind, the deaf, and lame, and the mute is that they all live with the desire for what will make them whole. Despite their disability, their anguish, their desolation, they had something that kept them going: their desire for healing…to be saved from what oppressed and afflicted them. Desire drew them to God.

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What sustains John the Baptist in the agony of his imprisonment is his desire for the Messiah: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”

Recommended Resources Benedict XVI, Pope. Spe Salvi/Saved in Hope (Holy Father’s new encyclical on hope)

Benedict XVI, Pope. Benedictus. Yonkers: Magnificat, 2006. Cameron, Peter John. To Praise, To Bless, To Preach—Cycle A. Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 2001. Hahn, Scott: http://www.salvationhistory.com/library/scripture/churchandbible/homilyhelps/homilyhelps.cfm Lohr, Aemiliana. The Mass Through the Year: Volume One—Advent to Palm Sunday. Westminster: Newman, 1958. Merton, Thomas. Seasons of Celebration: Meditations on the Cycle of Liturgical Feasts. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1983. Website: http://www.borromeo.org/reflect/homilies2007/homilyindex2007.htm -- by Msgr. Gregory Malovetz.