Reflection for Gaudete Sunday

Gaudete! Rejoice!

Gaudete Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent. A day we have all known for so long and which we anticipate each Advent. It is also a feast with a long history.     

Advent, which is our preparation for Christmas, was originally a forty-day penitential season like Lent. This goes back as far as the fourth or fifth century. In fact, Advent used to begin on November 12 (just after the Memorial of St. Martin of Tours) and was called “St. Martin’s Lent.” In the ninth century, the duration of Advent was reduced to four weeks, a period beginning four Sundays before Christmas. It still preserved most of the characteristics of a penitential season, which made it a kind of counterpart to Lent. Gaudete Sunday provides a similar break about midway through a season which is otherwise of a penitential character and signifies the nearness of the Lord’s coming.

So today we rejoice. Why? Because our focus shifts. In the past two weeks we focused on the coming of Christ, but today our focus changes from “The Lord is coming,” to “The Lord is near.” This celebration is a reminder that God who loves us is still in charge and that we await his coming not with fear, but with tremendous joy. In the middle of the season, Gaudete Sunday calls us to rejoice in hope! This lighter and more joyous mood is represented by the changes in the color of the vestments, a hue only seen today and on Laetare Sunday. Also, today we light the third candle of the Advent wreath, which is rose-colored.

“The Lord is near,” calls for a heightened sense of joyous anticipation. But we don’t do this only by decorating the monastery. In today’s first reading from Isaiah, we hear: “Strengthen the hands that are feeble, make firm the knees that are weak,/ say to those whose hearts are frightened: Be strong, fear not! Here is your God.  …He comes to save you. …With divine recompense he comes to save you.” The second reading of James is even more explicit. “…the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another, that you may not be judged.”

These two readings have a special message for us if we truly wish to rejoice, to prepare the way for the Lord. We can brighten up our home to great extent, and this is important, but the real task is how we brighten up and strengthen our life in community. Our preparation for the coming of the Lord is done in our way of living community, in our treatment of those with whom we share this journey. Those two readings seem to remind us that there will be no true “Gaudete” without truly rejoicing with those with whom we share the journey.

So, Gaudete Sunday is a beacon of hope, a call to lift spirits and anticipate the joy of Christ’s birth as the Advent journey nears its end. It is a time to think about what it means to “rejoice in the Lord” and how to live in the peace that guards our hearts and minds in Christ and those with whom we share that joy.

Madeline Engel says it so well in this ending of one of her poems:

But now is the hour
When I remember
An infant’s power
On a cold December.
Midnight is dawning
And the birth of wonder.