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    • The Third Sunday of Advent
    Cycle C
    2001

    First Reading
    Zephaniah 3:14-18

    Shout for joy, O daughter Zion! sing joyfully, O Israel! Be glad and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! The Lord has removed the judgment against you, he has turned away your enemies; the King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst, you have no further misfortune to fear. On that day, it shall be said to Jerusalem: Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged! The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a mighty savior; He will rejoice over you with gladness, and renew you in his love. He will sing joyfully because of you, as one sings at festivals.

    Second Reading
    Philippians 4:4-7

    Rejoice in the Lord always! I say it again. Rejoice! Everyone should see how unselfish you are. The Lord himself is near. Dismiss all anxiety from your minds. Present your needs to God in every form of prayer and in petitions full of gratitude. Then God's own peace, which is beyond all understanding, will stand guard over your hearts and minds, in Christ Jesus.

    Gospel
    Luke 3:10-18

    The crowds asked John, "What ought we to do?" In reply he said, "Let the man with two coats give to him who has none. The man who has food should do the same." Tax collectors also came to be baptized, and they said to him, "Teacher, what are we to do?" He answered them, "Exact nothing over and above your fixed amount." Soldiers likewise asked him, "What about us?" He told them, "Do not bully anyone. Denounce no one falsely. Be content with your pay." The people were full of anticipation, wondering in their hearts whether John might be the Messiah. John answered them all by saying: "I am baptizing you in water, but there is one to come who is mightier than I. I am not fit to loosen his sandal strap. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire. His winnowing-fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire." Using exhortations of this sort, he preached the good news to the people.

    Text from Lectionary for Mass
    © 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine
    © 1969 International Committee on English in the Liturgy, Inc.
    All rights reserved

    My Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

    This is the Sunday of rejoicing in the middle of Advent. For a long time, Advent was consider a form of Lent and so there was a much greater emphasis on fasting, on penance, on seriousness, etc. Just as in the middle of Lent there is a Sunday of rejoicing, so also in Advent there was the Sunday we celebrate today: Laetare Sunday was the name given to it from the Latin word the began the entrance antiphon.

    Today, with the changes in the Liturgy that came about through the Second Vatican Council, the focus is on preparation for the Birth of our Lord at Christmas. Even with this change of focus, there is still a somber joy to the season, rather than a sense of full rejoicing. There is no Gloria sung on the Sundays of Advent. One of the reasons for this is that we want to experience again the joy of singing "Gloria," "Glory to God in the highest" once again on the great Vigil of Christmas. Part of good liturgy, good celebrating of important events, is to take good things away for a while so that we appreciate them more when we have them once again.

    The first reading today, from the Prophet Zephaniah, tells Jerusalem to rejoice because the judgment against her has been taken away. To understand this reading, we must think of ourselves as "Jerusalem." We are the people chosen by God. When we are honest with ourselves, we know that within us we are not very centered on God or on doing God's will in our lives. Rather, we like to follow the things that bring us pleasur and delight, often without thinking of the consequences. Jersualem of old, our ancestors in the faith, were no different from us. But God had invited them to a special relationship with Himself. At first they were delighted with that and wanted to try to keep to His ways. But later they often forgot this contract with God.

    We also have a contract with God when we believe in Him. How silly of us to think that we can believe in a God and not expect God to ask anything of us. And so we have to begin to ask the question: If I believe in God, what might God ask of me? The answer, of course, is clear in the Holy Scriptures, in the Bible. Yet we do not always want to take the time to read the Bible and ask ourselves what it means. So one of the first things that we should do in this time of Advent is read the Bible again, or at least begin to read it seriously.

    Our rejoicing comes about not because we are God and God wants to congratulate us. No, we rejoice because God continues to love us and to invite us over and over to share His life. We don't really believe that, but the Bible keeps telling us that it is true. Some day we ought to live like an alcoholic in Alcoholics Anonymous and take the risk of living as though we believed that God really loves us.

    The second reading today, from Philippians, again tells us to rejoice. Now we are invited to rejoice because the Lord is near. Perhaps we have never experienced the nearness of God. Perhaps we cannot really believe that God is with us, beside us, involved in our lives. The Bible keeps telling us that our God is a God who saves, a God who loves us intensely, a God who wants only what is good for us, a God willing to give His own life for us. What a change in our lives when we begin to believe that! Then truly God's own peace begins to stand guard over our hearts and our minds. We must trust this God!

    In the Gospel, Saint John the Baptist preaches Good News to the people. Our word "gospel" is simply an English equivalent of those two words: Good News. Why is the message of John the Baptist "good news"? Because John is proclaiming to the people that there is a Messiah, a Savior, One anointed by God, who is coming to love us all. The people recognized the truth of what John was saying. All kinds of people began to ask what they should do.

    Do we ever ask that question: what must I do to be saved? The answer of the Bible is so very simple: Believe in Jesus and trust Him entirely.

    Once we begin to believe, then we can rejoice because we know that salvation is a gift that we cannot earn. We rejoice because we come to know a God who loves us and wants us to be fully alive. We rejoice because our faith does not make us narrow and closed and condemning of others, but opens us to all that is truly good in our common humanity. We rejoice because this God constantly is willing to forgive our littleness, our stupidities, our weaknesses and even our outright rejections of Him. He only asks us to trust in Him. In that trust is the beginning of any change within us that might ever be of important to the world that is to come. Let us bless the Lord!
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