KNOW YE WHO STANDETH AMONG YOU!

 A SERMON FOR THE 3RD SUNDAY IN ADVENT

Today is Gaudete Sunday.  Gaudete, as you all know by now, is the Latin word for “Rejoice.”  We are meant to rejoice today as we get closer to the Birth of Christ.  We’ve often mentioned how the joys of Christmas are anticipated during this otherwise penitential season of Advent.  Advent, you see, unlike Lent, is not all about doing penance, making reparation for the sins that caused our blessed Lord such suffering.  Advent, it’s true, does have its penances—last week, we had the fast and abstinence on the vigil of the Immaculate Conception; this week we have the three Ember Days to think about, and finally, next week takes us to Christmas Eve, another day of fast and abstinence.  But by and large, we live almost entirely in a different world from that of penance during this month of December.  We’re too busy enjoying the current period of good will and holiday cheer that radiates from a slightly more pleasant world.  That world, unfortunately, takes advantage of this by commercializing our charity, turning our good and loving thoughts into over-indulging and spending money, buying tinsel gifts for each other that ultimately mean nothing.  It’s what we have come to expect from the world, we can’t beat it, so we join it, and that’s okay to a certain extent so long as we don’t lose sight of the real charity that Christmas is all about.

Today, our joy at the approach of Christmas is meant to be that kind of supernatural joy.  We are reminded by the Church to put the “Christ” back in “Christmas”, to remember the reason for the season.  You’ve all seen the bumper stickers, so often in fact that they have become clichés to be ignored and forgotten.  And yet, surely, the fact that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world “to save the world from Satan’s power” should give us that “comfort and joy”, real supernatural joy, that should turn us all into “merry gentlemen”—and ladies and children—whom nothing may dismay!  For Satan’s power over the world was in fact broken on that cold winter’s night in Bethlehem, shattered like a fallen icicle.  The Blessed Virgin gave birth to an Infant Son who was to be the Light of the World, and by so doing she smashed the power of Satan and crushed his head beneath her heel.  Reason for rejoicing indeed!

But there is a serious message also, hidden away in today’s Gospel.  As we read this Record of John, we are warned by him that “there standeth one among you, whom ye know not.”  He speaks, of course, of the Christ, the Messiah sent to save the chosen people, a people who would for the most part reject him.  Another St. John, John the Evangelist, echoes this warning in the Last Gospel of the Mass, “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.  He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”  Still today, there are so many who know him not and receive him not.  Those who claim to be God’s own people, members of the Catholic Church, how do we receive our blessed Lord?  So many Catholics today are completely ignorant of their faith, thanks to the wholesale apostasy of their clergy.  They know him not.  And thanks to the abolition of the true Mass and its replacement by an almost certainly invalid mockery based on the denial of the Real Presence, these same Catholics “receive him not.”  They are probably receiving simple bread when they hold their dirty hands out to grasp the host from the old lady whose turn it is this week to dish it out.  They receive him not.

And even here, where we have the true faith and the true Mass, where Christ is truly present in the Blessed Sacrament, do we receive him in such a way as St. John the Evangelist describes in the Last Gospel?  Is the presence of Christ within us merely a pleasant but short-lived experience confined to a few minutes on Sunday morning?  Or do we receive him in such a way that we are born again, “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God?”  Do we in fact live solely to do God’s will and not our own?  Do we rise to become like those of whom St. John the Evangelist writes, “to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his Name.”

So rejoice today!  We’re surrounded by a multitude of natural reasons for rejoicing, but rejoice above all for the right reason.  If we’re members of Christ’s mystical Body, the Church, and if we’re in the state of grace, then there is no reason why we may not participate in the Gift of the Manger, the Child of Bethlehem, “house of bread”, and receive that Christ Child who brings us the grace of salvation and the power to become ourselves the sons of God.