HOMILY FOR MASS FOR 3RD SUNDAY OF ADVENT YEAR A – ST. MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY

Homily for Mass for 3rd Sunday of Advent Year A
St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney

If the Virgin Mary is our Christmas hero among the saints, holding forth the baby Jesus for our adoration; if the apostle John is our Lenten favourite, resting on Jesus’ breast at the Last Supper and alone of the apostles beside the Good Friday Cross; if St Mary Magdalene is our hero amongst the saints of Easter, first to proclaim Christ’s Resurrection; then St John the Baptist is surely our Advent Saint. Throughout this season we see him pointing forward to the Christ who is to come at Christmas, at the end of our lives, and at the End of Time; the Christ who comes to us with a promise of salvation and eternity.

Yet today we see poor John languishing in Herod’s dungeon, awaiting a brutal and senseless death. He is assailed by doubt, powerlessness, loneliness, feeling altogether wasted. John was called to herald the long-awaited Messiah and had faithfully done so. But now he’s not so sure. This supposed Messiah did not seem to act as the prophets of old and now it seemed John would be the last of them. The early Jesus was more like an Old Testament figure, indeed more like John the Baptist himself: He called all to repentance, and inveighed against sinners and hypocrites, especially the rich and powerful. But now from his prison cell John hears that Jesus is talking a lot more about love and mercy, reconciliation and peace. What’s worse, Jesus and his mates are getting a reputation for playing fast and loose with the Jewish Law regarding purification, the Sabbath and the like. Detractors are calling them “gluttons and drunkards”, and there’s no doubt they spend a lot of time at parties, even with tax collectors and other undesirables. John’s disciples were famously men of penance who rarely smiled; the Baptist himself had never tasted wine. Yet Jesus and his followers seem to be having far too much fun for genuinely religious figures. They seemed to have abandoned the purple of Advent for a rather more rosy vesture altogether…

The Baptist is in prison for standing up against Herod who was making the institution of marriage his plaything and using the power of the state to sanction his disordered desire. But now poor John hears that Jesus Himself has absolved a woman caught in adultery and regularly consorts with loose women. If this Jesus is a false Messiah, then John his herald is a false prophet. So he’s deeply troubled as he awaits his death and wonders if it’s all for nothing. But his deepest instinct is still to trust what Jesus says; so he sends an embassy to seek some explanation.

Jesus does not respond directly to the interrogation. He doesn’t say “Yes, I’m the One, the Messiah you’ve all been waiting for, so tell cousin Johnny not to worry.” Rather, He tells them to report what they see: Isaiah’s promise that the eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, those ransomed to death brought back, was being fulfilled. Surely that would convince cousin John that God was at work in Jesus. But then Jesus adds His clincher miracle to the report: “And tell John that the poor have the Gospel preached to them.”
 
Hold on: cleansing lepers and raising the dead those are surely miracles; but preaching? How can Jesus think this is a proof to John that he is the Christ? Well, some of Jesus’ miracles clearly evidence that he is sent by God; some, indeed, suggest He is God. But it is preaching, more than all the other signs, that shows what kind of God. The miracle of preaching reveals that our God is a speaking God. The eternal life of Father, Son and Spirit has ever been an out-going, communicative life. What’s more, Jesus is not God the Father, not God the Holy Spirit, but only and properly God the Son, the Word of God, the Reason or Explanation or Homily of God, the Love Song sung by the Father from all eternity but spoken at last in time and in the flesh. It is God Himself who addresses us in true preaching and in receiving the Word we participate in the life of the Speaking God.  So in sending John his CV today, Jesus implies that all that precedes His preaching – the signs and wonders, the spectacular raisings and the more private cures – is pre-evangelisation, tilling the soil of people’s hearts so they might receive the seed of God’s Word and it might spring up in them to new life. The other miracles are in a sense mere preaching aids, entry points for the Word of God as it, as He, converts to faith and holiness. Only then, with the eyes of faith, will disciples appreciate the miracles around them and understand their true meaning.

Jesus’ miracles were not offered only to the fortunate few who happened to be nearby. They were offered even to those far away in dungeons: “Tell John,” Jesus says, “thatthe blind see and the deaf hear, for it is he and you whose eyes and ears must be opened, whose souls at last laid open to Who I Am. None are so blind as those who will not see, none so deaf as those who refuse to hear: they are the ones whose souls need to be raised from the dead. And if that was required even for John, the greatest of prophets, the greatest man born of old, all the more is it needed by us. Each of us has to be prepared, again and again, for the miracle of Christ’s preaching; then, by that preaching, have our eyes opened to seeing new wonders; and finally, as we come to share in that grace, we in turn become preachers of the word as we go and tell others what we have seen and heard.

In this season of penitential preparation for Christmas, for the End of Time, and for our own end, the Church is wrapped in the colour of bruises and imprisoned alongside John with all his forebodings. Yet on this Gaudete Sunday, the Church breaks out, as it were, in laughter. The miracle of preaching brings new sight and insight, new hearing and heart, especially for ‘the poor in spirit’, those most in need of Good News. That Good News makes disciples, disciples with a deep and abiding joy, a joy that sustains them through every challenge. This is the miracle of the Word of God, coming to prisoners like John and liberating them from anxiety, despondency and doubt. This same miraculous Word comes to us when our spirits are dry like the Australian outback and makes Gaudete roses bloom there and cicadas sing Introits. “Let the bush and the desert exult,” says Isaiah today, “let the outback rejoice, bloom… and sing for joy… Strengthen all weary hands, steady all trembling knees, and say to the fainthearted, ‘Courage! Be not afraid. For your [Christmas] Saviour is coming… They will come singing for joy, everlasting joy on their faces; sorrow and lament will be ended, and joy and gladness be theirs forever.” (cf. Isa 35:1-10)

Introduction to Mass for 3rd Sunday of Advent Year A
St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice… The Lord is at hand; have no anxiety about anything, but in all things, by prayer and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God…”. Welcome to St Mary’s Cathedral for the Solemn Mass for the Third Sunday of Advent, known as ‘Gaudete’ or Rejoicing Sunday. The day takes its name from the first word of the Introit that our choir just sang for us. And so while there are still two weeks to Christmas the Church is already dressing her priests up in Christmas wrapping and we are all invited to a foretaste not just of Christmas but of heaven.

I welcome this morning the members of the “Friends of St Mary’s”, an organisation dedicated to promoting the pastoral, cultural and historical dimensions of our cathedral’s life and presenting these to the city; and supporting the fabric, events and hospitality of this great basilica. I commend them for their important work and invite enthusiasts for our cathedral to join them. To ready our hearts to be a crib for the Christmas babe, let us then repent of our sins and experience Gaudete joy.