Homily: Advent Light

Year B / Advent / 3rd Sunday

Readings: Isaiah 61.1-2a, 10-11/ Canticle from Luke 1.46-48,49-50, 53-54 (R/v Is 61.10b) / 1 Thessalonians 5.16-24 / John 1.6-8, 19-28

It’s the morning of your posting to your secondary school. You wonder what’s in store for you: What will the new school be like? How will the teachers teach? Who will be my friends? Everything’s going to be different. You’re excited and anxious.

With Mom and Dad, you head off early to school. So do the other new and eager Secondary 1 students. As you walk up the school’s driveway, morning light is peeling back the darkness of the night. Then, you see what you’d never expect to find in school: a Christmas tree, all-aglow with twinkling lights. Mom lets out a “wow”; Dad smiles; and you say to yourself, “It’s probably going to be just fine.” 

We hope this is the experience our new students will have when they join us in St Joseph’s Institution. An 8-foot tall Christmas Tree, all awash with lights and trinkets, will indeed welcome them. And we do hope this will gladden them as they experience the joy of Christmas.

Our generous benefactors have made this possible. Their gift of the tree speaks of the Christmas joy they cannot help but share with many, not hoard for themselves. I believe their joy is rooted in and inspired by the joy of God, a joy so movingly expressed by God’s prodigious sharing of divine love with us. Jesus is the name God has given to describe the goodness being shared.

Sharing Jesus is God’s plan to fill our world with joy. But we cannot make this our true joy unless we let it be the kind of joy God wishes for us in Jesus. A joy that originates in another’s love for us. A joy that is alive, spontaneous, excessive, infectious. A joy that moves us to share it generously with others, especially the unhappy, the desolate, the despairing. 

In Jesus, this joy is never self-seeking but truly self-giving. This is the joy God has and shares. And God wishes that we make this joy our own so that we can truly live in love with God and in selflessness for neighbor. 

Any other kind of joy is selfish. When we decide what joy should be, when we determine how it should meet our expectations, and when we choose who deserves it, what we have is fake joy. It is superficial, wanting and short-lived. 

In contrast, true joy surprises, transforms and gives life. True joy is ours when someone bestows it on us when we least expect it.  True joy comes alive in us when another draws it out of us to share, especially when we think we have nothing to share. True joy becomes life-giving for us when we realize that its origin and goal lies in another’s love for us. Such joy inevitably refocuses our gaze onto the love of God whose singular joy is to be with us.

John the Baptist points us once again to the source of this kind of joy in today’s gospel reading. Jesus. Jesus is the light John came to testify to. 

But what kind of light is Jesus? How does Jesus shed light on God’s goodness in our midst? Why is the light of Jesus joyful? Perhaps this story can give us an answer.

A rabbi gathered his students just before dawn. He asked them to distinguish between day and night. As the first morning rays pierced the fading formless darkness in the distant east, a cock crowed. “Ah! Rabbi,” said one, “When the cock crows day has come and night is spent.” The rabbi shook his head.  

“Rabbi, is it when we can see and name the animals in the dawning light?” asked another tentatively. “It is not,” replied the rabbi. “Then, it must be when we can look out to the brightening horizon and see much more than the faint illumination our lamps give off in the dark.” The rabbi raised his head, looked steely but lovingly into the faces of each bewildering disciple.  

Then, he said: “There is light when we can look at each person we meet and recognize in the distinctive face of a brother and a sister, one like you and me, the image of God. Now, that is light.”

Light that enables us to look at another’s face and to behold in our shared human visage the promised divinity we share in as God’s children. This is the kind of the light Jesus brings into our world.

In Jesus’ light you and I can see the divine lines etched into our human faces more clearly: this is how we come to know that we are truly God’s beloved. More beautifully, I'd like to imagine Jesus’ light flooding God’s memory with the truth of who we must always be to God: God’s own, never to be forgotten but to be lovingly saved into eternity. 

This is our joy in Jesus. We have every right to celebrate this joy because it is already ours with Jesus’ birth. And we have every right to hope in this joy because Jesus will come into each new day of our lives. 

The 3rd Sunday of Advent invites us to remember, to celebrate and to believe in this joy we have in Jesus. It also calls us to let this joy resound in each of us so that we can proclaim it to one and another and to all. This is how we can help each other to better keep our gaze firmly on the reason for the season, as we busy ourselves with Christmas shopping, cooking and merrymaking in these last weeks of Advent. 

“The joy of the gospel, the joy of the good news,” Pope Francis observes, “fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus” (Evangelii Gaudium). Jesus encounters us daily; and isn't this good enough reason for us to herald the joy of Christmas?

The authors of our readings also speak about this joy in their writings. Isaiah rejoices in a Messiah who will make justice and praise spring up before all the nations. The Psalmist sings joyfully of the great things the Lord has done for him in God’s mercy. And Paul instructs us to rejoice always because God’s faithfulness in Jesus will accomplish the goodness God wishes for us not just in heaven but on earth too.

What about us? What about God’s goodness will we announce in these remaining Advent days? How can we be like the authors of our readings and the benefactors of the tree when we do this?

I believe we can: we all have something joyful to proclaim about God and God’s actions in our lives. Whether this be like the many small, twinkling lights on a Christmas tree or the radiant light of a new dawn, words and actions of care and consolation, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of sharing love or giving life that we have experienced will reflect something of the light of Jesus in whom we better see God’s love in one  another.

Then this announcement of joy we make might possibly be a far better gift to someone we love or we have hurt or we know needs some happiness than an expensive present purchased from Robinsons, Metro or Amazon. Sharing the joy of God’s presence this Christmas might indeed be good enough for him or her or them all to say, “This feels like Jesus has come, and I’m going to be just fine!” Let us not delay then in sharing this joy; after all, the Lord himself never delays in coming to us!

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

photo: april hoeller (christmasmagician.blogspot.com)