This Sunday, Jesus Gives John (and Us!) Reasons to Rejoice

If we are supposed to be rejoicing this Sunday, then why are we hearing this Gospel reading?

This is the Third Sunday of Advent, Year A, Gaudete, “Rejoice,” Sunday, when many priests wear rose vestments and the mood of the Church turns from remote preparation to joyful anticipation of Christmas.

Yet the Gospel begins with John in a dungeon, questioning.

Here are six takeaways for drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: The Gospel is about joy, but only after it spends some time in darkness.

This Sunday, we hear the story of how John, languishing in prison, sent messengers to ask Jesus, “Are you the one to come, or should we look for another?”

Instead of the voice of John crying out in the wilderness, we get a message from prison. Instead of bold faith, we get a concerned doubt.

Many commentators suggest that John didn’t doubt at all, but asked this question for the benefit of the messengers. By sending his disciples to Jesus with this question, they say, he might simply be helping move them from being disciples of him to becoming disciples of Jesus.

But maybe he asked the question for himself. “If he did,” Romano Guardini wrote in his book The Lord, “it would by no means conflict with his calling. Often, naively, we imagine the illumination of a prophet as a fixed thing, as though he had only to behold, once, in order to know without wavering forever after. … In reality, even a prophet’s life is shaken by all storms and saddled with all weaknesses.”

If John did ask for his own sake, he became more than the precursor, the great prophet announcing the Messiah: He became the model of the seeker and the sufferer.

Second: But we do know who John asked the question for. He asked it for us.

By giving us this Gospel in Advent, the Church is telling us it’s okay to have questions, and it directs us what to do with them: Bring them to Jesus.

We often find ourselves in the same place as John the Baptist. We can feel like we are imprisoned by our circumstances and uncertain in our faith. If so, the Gospel gives us permission to look to the tabernacle on this Third Sunday of Advent and say, with John, “Are you the one to come, or should we look for another?”

God gives us one answer in the Second Reading.

“Be patient, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord,” St. James says, then he gives a key example. “See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You too must be patient.”

God glories in being, in the very act of existence, like a farmer who cherishes each stage in the crop, from seedling to harvest.

To be patient, James says, you must “make your hearts firm,” “do not complain” and be constantly aware that “the Judge is standing before the gates.” For James, life means waiting, and waiting means bearing up to hardship over time without breaking.

Third: Patience turns out to be a key to the Christian life.

Church Father Tertullian has a high view of patience. He sees impatience at the heart of the Original Sin and patience as the necessary path of renewal.

Eve “would never have sinned at all, if she had honored the divine edict by maintaining her patience to the end,” he writes. “As God is the author of patience, so the devil is of impatience.” He even says “every sin is ascribable to impatience [because] ‘evil’ is ‘impatience of good.’”

On the other hand, patience, he says:

“fortifies faith, is the pilot of peace, assists charity, establishes humility; waits long for repentance … rules the flesh; preserves the spirit; bridles the tongue; restrains the hand; tramples temptations under foot … consoles the poor, teaches the rich moderation … is loved in childhood, praised in youth, looked up to in age; is beauteous in either sex, in every time of life.”

Patience is not the doormat virtue of those who tolerate evil and pretend everything is okay when it is far from okay. Instead, patience is the stand-tall virtue of those whose faith in God is unshakable and whose trust in him is irreversible.

W. H. Auden wrote, “Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.”

Fourth: John the Baptist shows what Christian patience looks like.

Jesus points out that John is not a “reed swayed by the wind,” but a man who stands up straight to the forces of the world. He is not spending his time “wearing fine clothing in royal palaces.” He spends it witnessing to Jesus among the people. He isn’t in prison because Christ’s message failed him, but because he stayed true to Christ’s message.

Jesus says John was “a prophet. Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. …  [T]here has been none greater than John the Baptist.”

All the prophets before John lived in a “Narnia” world where it was “always winter but never Christmas.” They were born into a Christless world, prayed for Christmas to come, then died in a Christless world. John at least met Jesus, but he was beheaded in a dungeon at the request of a dancing girl before Christ’s redemptive act.

The hope that sustained John can sustain us too. As Pope Benedict points out in his encyclical on hope (Spe Salvi): “the capacity to suffer for the sake of the truth is the measure of humanity. Yet this capacity to suffer depends on the type and extent of the hope that we bear within us and build upon.”

The ones who are closest to God aren’t those who are talented, healthy and materially well off and thank God for it; the ones closest to God are those who are hurt, weak, and see more bad things are coming — but trust God anyway.

In Isaiah, the Lord is talking about us when he says: “Strengthen the hands that are feeble, make firm the knees that are weak, say to those whose hearts are frightened: Be strong, fear not! …They will see the glory of the Lord, the splendor of our God.”

Christmas isn’t a festival for the strong; it’s an encouragement for the weak. And the greatest encouragement is the reality of Jesus Christ.

Fifth: What Jesus tells John is also a message meant for us.

John in this Gospel passage gives us permission to ask Jesus hard questions. Jesus in the Gospel shows how he answers them.

He says: “Go and tell John what you hear and see.” What they hear and see is what we hear and see. Not only have we seen medical miracles in the life of the Church, we have seen everyday miracles in our own lives:

• “The blind regain their sight,” Jesus says. And faith has opened many of our eyes, also, to the meaning, purpose and worth of life.
• “The lame walk,” he says, and hope has allowed many of us to move forward in a world that once overwhelmed us.
• “Lepers are cleansed,” he says, and we who were made unclean by mortal sin have been healed and freed by confession.
• “The deaf hear,” he says, and the Word of God has cut through the noise that drowned God out and we can hear him loud and clear, finally.
• “The dead are raised,” he adds, including family members we have seen transformed by grace.

Finally, he says, “the poor have the good news proclaimed to them, and blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”

What is the Good News? It is that, while John the Baptist is the greatest prophet, “the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

Sixth: How are we greater than John the Baptist? We have the answer in in front of us each Sunday.

In each church we see the Stations of Cross, tracing the path of our redemption. John never saw that. We see the baptismal font, where we were freed from sin and incorporated into Trinitarian life and given the gifts of the Holy Spirit. John never saw that.

And we have Jesus Christ truly present in the Sacrament in every tabernacle and every Mass in the world, available to us in communion. John never received the Eucharist, either.

So, as Advent continues, “Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” Christmas is coming, and with it, real freedom in Christ Jesus, our Eucharistic Lord.

Image: Saint John the Baptist in Prison Sends
His Disciples to Question Jesus,
drawing, Ermenegildo Lodi, Wikimedia;
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

By Tom Hoopes