by CCW | 17 December 2017 15:00
Jesus’ question to the multitude in the wilderness concerning John the Baptist is equally his question to us in the wilderness of our contemporary world. It is complemented, I think, by Mary’s questions at the Annunciation about “what manner of salutation this should be” and “how shall this be seeing as I know not a man?” Advent is the season of questions which open us out to the truth of God coming to us as Word, as Judge, and as Light. On this Sunday, there is a change of emphasis, a kind of lightening of the darkness even as we enter into the darkest week and day of nature’s year with the near approach of the winter solstice.
This Sunday is sometimes called Gaudete Sunday, the term derives from an introit anthem taken from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians which we also hear in the Epistle reading for next Sunday. The emphasis is altogether on rejoicing. Gaudete means Rejoice!
The third candle on our Advent wreath is rose or pink coloured suggesting a lightening of the purple or violet colour which symbolizes the penitential aspect of Advent. In some places, too, the vestments are rose-coloured for this Sunday. Gaudete Sunday in Advent has its parallel with Laetare Sunday in Lent which is another word for rejoice. But the rose or pink colour also signals the special role of Mary in the divine work of human redemption, something which is captured in many of the carols and hymns of the season such as the lovely 15th century German Marian carol, Es ist ein Ros entstprungen[1], ‘Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming,’ especially as set to Michael Praetorius’s 1609 harmonization of a sixteenth century melody.
It is hauntingly beautiful, at once reflective and joyful. The image of a rose in bloom “mitten im kalten Winter, wohl zu der halben Nacht’, ‘amid the cold of winter when half spent was the night,’ is especially lovely and moving. The second verse underlies the theological theme which complements our readings today; at once the fulfillment of prophecy and the role and place of Mary in the redemption of our humanity. “Isaiah ‘twas foretold it, / the Rose I have in mind; / With Mary we behold it, the virgin mother kind. / To show God’s love aright, / She bore to men a Saviour, / When half spent was the night.”
John and Mary are the two outstanding figures in the landscape of Advent. Both serve to prepare us for the radical meaning of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity in the coming of Christ. They do so through the powerful questions which signal our active participation in all things spiritual. What is looked for is our active seeking of what God seeks and provides for us. Our seeking is itself an acknowledgment of our own insufficiency, our lack or want of what makes us whole and complete. There is the awareness of our own darkness; only so can we look to the light. That is surely a cause of rejoicing however great the darkness of our world and day. John’s question to Jesus, after all, is asked from the confines and the darkness of prison!
Jesus points the multitudes in the wilderness to the real purpose and meaning of the ministry of John the Baptist. That is echoed as part of the ministry of the Church in today’s collect. “Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just”; only so might we “be found an acceptable people in thy sight”.
John the Baptist’s whole ministry is the ministry of preparation for the coming of Christ. Jesus points to the one who points to Him. John exists for the entire purpose of pointing us to Christ in the immediacy of his coming. He is defined by “the one who comes after me,” he says, “the latchet of whose sandals I am not worthy to unloose”. That is why he is more than a prophet. He is the quintessential vox clamatis in deserto, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’” There is a rejoicing in the wilderness, then and now.
Mary, too, is essential to the Advent of Christ. He comes to us only through her and especially through her ‘yes’ to God, her “be it unto me according to thy word”. It is the fullest, the truest and the purest expression of what it really means to be human. That, too, is surely a cause of the greatest rejoicing however great the darkness of our world and day, however great, too, the fears and worries, the stresses and anxieties of our hearts and minds. Sometimes the build-up to Christmas seems all too much. All because we forget what we are seeking. All because we forget the radical meaning of Christ’s coming. We lose the joy.
This Sunday awakens us to the joy that is found in God’s engagement with our humanity. It is not all doom and gloom; indeed the doom and gloom only serve to heighten the joy and light of Christmas. There is a lightening of the darkness in this week of nature’s deepest darkness. Something of the joys of Mary, alluding to a wonderful Old English carol, is found in the words of Christ to John’s disciples before he turns to the multitudes who had followed John into the wilderness to ask them what they were seeking. The whole Gospel for today focuses on the nature of learning. Learning what? Learning the purpose of the Advent, the purpose of Christ’s coming, the purpose of God’s engagement with our humanity. Theology is very much a wilderness affair.
“Do we look for another?” John has his disciples ask Christ about himself. Jesus speaks to the darkness of human experience, what Paul in 1st Corinthians calls “the hidden things of darkness” that reside in our hearts. Only by making us aware of the darkness “shall every man have praise of God.” What do we learn? We learn to see and think about what we are seeing. “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see,” Jesus says. And what are those things? They go to the heart of the Advent message of human redemption. “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” Words in the wilderness.
They are wonderful words which awaken hope and joy in our hearts. They are wonderfully incorporated into the Bidding Prayer composed by the Very Reverend Eric Milner-White, the Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, for the Service of Advent Lessons and Carols used in 1918, just after the darkness and the devastations of the First World War. Words in the wilderness of modernity. Words of hope and light about the redemption of our humanity, if only we will hear and see.
The truth of our humanity is found in our being with God. It means the overcoming of the darkness of sin and wickedness. How? By the coming of that pure one. Christ is “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure,” as the ancient theologian, Irenaeus, beautifully puts it. The purpose of Advent is to open us to our life with God in Christ, to his being with us as the light in the darkness of our hearts and in the wilderness of our world. How can we not rejoice? The questions of Jesus to us are themselves full of the notes of expectancy and rejoicing. Never more so than in this Gospel and on this day.
Fr. David Curry
Advent III, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/12/17/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-in-advent-6/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.