I find our culture often presents challenges to finding joy in our waiting. Christmas décor has been on the shelves for months now, and Christmas sales have been announced by my inbox since sometime in October! But waiting can be a joyful time, especially when we are aware that we are not simply waiting, but that we are being prepared for something unimaginably awesome. Christ’s coming has been announced — yes! — and by voices far holier than those of the sales-pitch jingle. Voices like those of Isaiah and John the Baptist, speak to our hearts and call out to us from amidst the desert.
The readings for this third Sunday of Advent begin with awesome imagery. Can we imagine the desert bursting into bloom? A whole vast sea of sand suddenly flush with color? A place of silence and stillness alive with blossoms that rise up from the sand, reach for the sun and ripple in the wind? Even the flowers, Isaiah says, will “rejoice with joyful song.”
| December 11 – 3rd Sunday of Advent |
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Is 35:1-6, 10 |
These are the images Isaiah gives us to think about the coming of Christ. The desert abloom is both an image of the life Christ will soon bring into our desert of sin, and of the joy and gladness we will know when he comes. Isaiah’s images are quite fitting to rosy Gaudete Sunday: Rejoice and be glad! Further, like the flowers, we can join Isaiah with our own Alleluia, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me … to bring glad tidings to the poor.”
As a day for rejoicing and bringing glad tidings, Gaudete Sunday is also a day on which our gaze is directed toward Christ by another figure from the desert: John the Baptist. Out in the desert, John had been bringing “glad tidings to the poor.” But in the Gospel reading for this Sunday, we find him in prison, asking his disciples to go and see if Christ has come. And he has!
Christ himself shows us that John was in the desert to announce his coming and to prepare his way: “Yes, I tell you. … This is the one about whom it is written: ‘Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you; he will prepare your way before you.'”
Thus, the readings for this Gaudete Sunday work together to surround us with a scene of images of the coming Good News. We are situated in the desert, awaiting its blossoming and listening to the voice of John the Baptist. The way is being prepared, and while we rejoice, we have yet a little while to be patient.
The time is at hand, then, as we wait, to “make [our] hearts firm.” To not only hear the voice of John the Baptist telling us of Christ but also revealing his love for Christ to us. Christ tells us of John’s holiness: “among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist.” And such holiness was cultivated in his own heart, out in the desert, proclaiming the Good News while he yet waited upon it. John had to confirm Christ’s coming from prison. What a firm heart! And what a faith to be imitated: a first flower in the desert.
And so we might let John’s voice speak in our hearts today as we wait. Both with joy and with a recognition that our hearts might look more like a desert than a rosy garden. We might, then, let John, in his desire to enter into the desert, enter into our hearts so as to help us prepare a way there for Christ. Draw near to John the Baptist and he “will prepare your way before you.” Rejoice!
Catherine Cavadini, Ph.D., is the assistant chair of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Theology and director of its master’s program in theology.
