3RD Sunday of Advent 12-16-07

Scripture Readings
First Isaiah 35:1-6a, 10
Second James 5:7-10
Gospel Matthew 11:2-11

Prepared by: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P.

1. Subject Matter
• Gaudete Sunday: “The desert will rejoice with joyful song…. Those whom the Lord has
ransomed will return…crowned with everlasting joy; they will meet with joy and gladness.”
• The connection between “desire” and “joy” - the role of desire in our sanctification.

2. Exegetical Notes
• “See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient” – “Be patient not
only in the face of outrageous injustice, but toward the ordinary trials of life” (JBC).
• “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” – “The very security of
disbelief as well as that of orthodoxy is probed deeply by the New Testament, to see whether
it still contains an openness to faith. If faith is not simply assent to a proposition but life with
God, then it can live only by increasing and decreasing, in experiences that strengthen or
endanger it” (E. Schweizer).

3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church

• 27 The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for
God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself.
• 1718 The Beatitudes respond to the natural desire for happiness. This desire is of divine
origin: God has placed it in the human heart in order to draw man to the One who alone can
fulfill it.
• 1765 Love causes a desire for the absent good and the hope of obtaining it; this movement
finds completion in the pleasure and joy of the good possessed.
• 1843 By hope we desire, and with steadfast trust await from God, eternal life and the graces
to merit it.
• 2557 "I want to see God" expresses the true desire of man.

4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities

• St. Gregory the Great: “If John the Baptist had spoken more fully he might have said,
‘Since you thought it worthy of yourself to be born for humanity, say whether you will also
think it worthy of yourself to die for humanity. In this way I, who have been the herald of your
birth, will also be the herald of your death. I will announce your arrival in the nether world as
the One who is to come, just as I have already announced it on earth.”
• St. Jerome: “The kingdom of heaven is Jesus the Christ himself, who exhorts all people to
repentance and draws them to himself by love.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “A man’s life consists in the affection that principally sustains him and
in which he finds his greatest satisfaction.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “Men are ordained by the divine Providence towards a higher good
than human fragility can experience in the present life. That is why it was necessary for the
human mind to be called to something higher than the human reason here and now can
reach, so that it would thus learn to desire something and with zeal tend towards something
that surpasses the whole state of the present life.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “The desire for joy is inherently stronger than the fear of sadness.”
• St. Catherine of Siena: ““So your desire is an infinite thing. Were it not, could I be served by
any finite thing, no virtue would have value or life. For I who am infinite God want you to
serve me with what is infinite, and you have nothing infinite except your soul’s love and
desire….I am infinite Good and I therefore require of you infinite desire. It is right, then that
you should build your foundation by slaying and annihilating your self-will. Then, with your
will subjected to mine, you would give me tender, flaming, infinite desire, seeking my honor
and the salvation of souls. In this way you would feast at the table of holy desire—a desire
that is never scandalized either in yourself or your neighbors, but finds joy in everything and
reaps all the different kinds of fruit that I bestow on the soul.”
• Blessed Angela of Foligno: “When the soul is told: ‘What do you want?’ it can respond: ‘I
want God.’ God then tells it, ‘I am the one making you feel that desire.’ Until it reaches this
point, the soul’s desire is not true or integral. This form of desire is granted to the soul by a
grace by which it knows that God is within it, and that it is in companionship with God. This
gift is to have a desire, now a unified one, in which it feels that it loves God in a way
analogous to the true love with which God has loved us. The soul feels God merging with it
and becoming its companion.”
• C.S. Lewis: “Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet
another human being who has some inkling…of that something which you where born
desiring, and which… you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it.
All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—
tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught
your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die
away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt
you would say, “Hear at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it.
It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing
 we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we
shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work.
While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all….The thing itself has… always… summoned
you out of yourself. And if you will not go out of yourself to follow it,… the desire itself will
evade you.”
• Oscar V. Milosz: “Ah, how do I fill up this emptiness in life? What can I do? For the desire is
always there, stronger, and madder than ever. It is like a fire in the sea that blasts its flame
into the deep universal black emptiness. It is a desire to embrace the possibilities.”
• Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P.: “It is here, under this intimate flash where the good shines
forth, that the desire for happiness is revealed in its best light. By excluding this desire from
morality, we have deformed it and painted a false picture of it, because the desire for
happiness is itself a spark of the divine image within us.”
• Rainer Maria Rilke: “Why don’t you think of Him as the one who is coming, who has been
approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive…. What keeps you from living
your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see how
everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be His beginning,
since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful?... Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as
long as it is done out of love) we begin… Celebrate Christmas in this devout feeling, that
perhaps he needs this very anguish of yours in order to begin…. Be patient and without
bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more
difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.”
• Fr. Julian Carron: “To be engaged with one’s own humanity means to take seriously this
heart, this inexorable desire for happiness and fulfillment…. Why should we engage
ourselves with this heart? Because this heart is the fundamental criterion with which we
approach things; it is the ultimate criterion for discovering the truth of man, for recognizing
what is true.”
• Fr. Julian Carron: “If the link with the real is in crisis, then the ‘I’ is not awakened, and so
you find yourself saying, ‘And what if there is no desire? What if I don’t have this desire?’
Don’t complain that the desire is not there; what is in crisis is the relationship with the real,
and if you can’t find the way to rebuild the relationship with the real, there will be no more
desire. When an individual is reawakened within his being by the Presence, the Attraction,
the Awe, then he is grateful and joyful.”
• Msgr. Massimo Camisasca: “Joy is born of the judgment that we are on the right path, and
of the perception of an Other in whom we find all our strength…. The absence of joy means
that the person has been uprooted, whether through a lack of awareness (the loss of
memory) or through disorientation (the loss of self in things, in anxieties, or in
responsibilities). There is a link between joy and the experience of one’s own usefulness…. If
joy is certitude that the final plenitude is already present here and now, the sense of
“usefulness” is the desire that this plenitude transform life…. Usefulness is recognizing the
place that the Master Artisan assigns to our life; it is following him, following his indications,
and entering into his sign. The greatest usefulness of our lives lies in entering the place
Christ has created, so that this might be of use to the world. He died ‘for us men and for our
salvation.’ This is why obedience is joy; it is the sure and transcendent cause of joy.”
• Robert Louis Stevenson: “True realism always and everywhere is…to find out where joy
resides, and give it voice…For to miss the joy is to miss all.”
• Msgr. Luigi Giussani: “Joy is the certitude that comes into the world for the fact of having
been touched by the Mystery.”
• Msgr. Romano Guardini: “What a tremendous thought it is: heaven on the way to meet me,
relentlessly advancing toward me, and God’s eye is upon me. And to think of the mightiness
of the will behind it! The monumental strength of that desire!”

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars

• The “Christmas grace” of St. Therese of Lisieux - see The Story of a Soul, Chapter 5:
Therese received the grace of leaving behind her childhood and the grace of her complete
conversion; the episode ends with Therese stating: “I experienced a great desire to work for
the conversion of sinners, a desire I hadn’t felt so intensely before.”
• Jacques Fesch, a convicted murderer who experienced a profound conversion to the faith
before his death by execution in 1957, wrote from his prison cell: “Be like the clay which the
divine potter can shape as he wills. The one who abandons himself to God in this way no
longer has a heart of flesh in his breast, but a ball of fire. And I assure you that when the Lord
begins to kindle the fire of his love, his victim is quick to cry for mercy, for the joy is beyond
our human strength to bear.”

6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI

• “If I can be convinced that the one who loves me is close to me, even in situations of
suffering, the joy that remains in the depth of my heart is ever greater than all sufferings.”
• “To listen to Christ…. To listen to him in the Word, preserved in Sacred Scripture. To listen to
him in the very events of our lives, trying to read in them the messages of providence. To
listen to him, finally, in our brothers, especially in the little ones and the poor, for whom Jesus
himself asked our concrete love. To listen to Christ and to obey his voice. This is the only
way that leads to joy and love.”
• “Christianity is, by its very nature, joy—the ability to be joyful. The ‘Rejoice!’ with which it
begins expresses its whole nature. By its very essence, by its very nature, Christian belief is
‘glad tidings’…deep joy of the heart is also the true prerequisite for a sense of humor, and
thus humor is, in a certain sense, the measure of faith.”
• “Man’s appetite for joy, the ultimate quest for which the human being wanders restlessly from
place to place, only makes sense if he can face the question of death… Nothing can make
man laugh unless there is an answer to the question of death. And conversely, if there is an
answer to death, it will make genuine joy possible.”
• “Between the Son of God-made-flesh and his Church there is a profound, unbreakable and
mysterious continuity by which Christ is present today in his people. He is always
contemporary with us, he is always contemporary with the Church. And his very presence in
the community, in which he himself is always with us, is the reason for our joy. Yes, Christ is
with us, the Kingdom of God is coming.”
• “Worship is the context in which we can discover joy, the liberating, victorious Yes to life.”
• “Faith gives joy. When God is not there, the world becomes desolate, and everything
becomes boring, and everything is completely unsatisfactory. It’s easy to see today how a
world empty of God is also increasingly consuming itself, how it has become a wholly joyless
world. The great joy comes from the fact that there is this great love, and that is the essential
message of faith. You are unswervingly loved. This also explains why Christianity spread first
predominantly among the weak and suffering. To that extent it can be said that the basic
element of Christianity is joy…. It is joy in the proper sense. A joy that exists together with a
difficult life and also makes this life livable.”
• “Jesus Christ draws to himself the heart of each person, enlarges it and fills it with joy that
moves and attracts the human person to free adoration, to bow with heartfelt respect before
the Truth he has encountered.”
• “Something of the beauty of Advent can be found even in difficulty. Illness and suffering can
therefore, like a great joy, also be a personal Advent—a visit by God who wants to enter my
life and turn toward me.”
• “It is in fact true, is it not, that all joy which arises independently of Christ or contrary to his
will proves insufficient and only thrusts the person back down into a confusion in which, when
all is said and done, he can find no lasting joy? Only with Christ has authentic joy made its
appearance and that the only thing of ultimate importance in our lives is to learn to see and
know Christ, the God of grace, the light and joy of the world. Our joy will be genuine only
when it no longer depends on things that can be stripped from us and destroyed and when it
has its basis rather in those innermost depths of our existence which no worldly power can
take from us. Every external loss should turn us back to these innermost depths and better
dispose us for our true life…To celebrate Advent means to bring to life within ourselves the
hidden Presence of God. It takes place to the extent that we travel the path of conversion
and change our cast of mind by turning from the visible to the invisible. As we travel this path,
we learn to see the miracle of grace; we learn that there can be no more luminous source of
joy for human beings and the world than the grace that has appeared in Christ. The world is
not a futile confusion of drudgery and pain, for all the distress the world contains is supported
in the arms of merciful love; it is caught up in the forgiving and saving graciousness of our
God.”

7. Other Considerations
• The reality that unites the blind, the deaf, and lame, and the mute is that they all live with the
desire for what will make them whole. Despite their disability, their anguish, their desolation,
they had something that kept them going: their desire for healing…to be saved from what
oppressed and afflicted them. Desire drew them to God.
• What sustains John the Baptist in the agony of his imprisonment is his desire for the
Messiah: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”

Recommended Resources
Benedict XVI, Pope. Spe Salvi/Saved in Hope (Holy Father’s new encyclical on hope)
Benedict XVI, Pope. Benedictus. Yonkers: Magnificat, 2006.

Cameron, Peter John. To Praise, To Bless, To Preach—Cycle A. Huntington: Our Sunday

Visitor, 2001.

Hahn, Scott:
http://www.salvationhistory.com/library/scripture/churchandbible/homilyhelps/homilyhelps.cfm

Lohr, Aemiliana. The Mass Through the Year: Volume One—Advent to Palm Sunday.
Westminster: Newman, 1958.

Merton, Thomas. Seasons of Celebration: Meditations on the Cycle of Liturgical Feasts.

Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1983.

Website: http://www.borromeo.org/reflect/homilies2007/homilyindex2007.htm -- by Msgr.

Gregory Malovetz.