4th Sunday of Advent, Year C
First Reading: Mi 5:2-5a
Second Reading: Heb 10:5-10
Gospel Reading: Lk 1:39-45
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice! Indeed, the Lord is near.”
The first word of that Entrance Antiphon, in Latin, gives this Sunday its name: Gaudete Sunday.
The First Reading echoes it: “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem!” The response to the Psalm repeats it, and so does the Second Reading.
Why should we rejoice?
The answer is that “the Lord has taken away the judgments against” us. Indeed, he has become our “salvation.”
Right after Adam and Eve’s fall, God said to the serpent — Satan, who had deceived them — “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.”
In these words — called the Protoevangelium, Latin for “Proto-Gospel” or “First Good News” — God promised victory over evil and the restoration of what humans had lost. It was the first hint of a Saviour, a Redeemer, who would make amends for Adam and Eve’s disobedience and lack of trust.
“Saviour,” “salvation,” and “Redeemer” are words we hear often in church, but their meaning can be overlooked.
To “redeem” is to “free” by “buying back” or “paying a ransom.” We needed to be freed from the three things that have enslaved us since the Fall: the pleasures of the senses, covetousness for earthly goods, and the desire for self-assertion. We had to be ransomed, or bought back, from Satan, who, through his success with Adam and Eve, gained a certain domination over us, including the power of death.
Finally, someone had to mend — to make amends for — the relationship with God that Adam and Eve had broken. If a small child breaks a window, he may repent, and his father may forgive him, but the window remains broken. The child cannot repair or pay for it himself. Similarly, we needed someone to take on the consequences of Adam and Eve’s rebellion, especially death, to make reparation (from the verb “to repair”) or restitution (from the verb “to restore”).
God solved these problems by becoming our Redeemer: he became a man and, as a man, did for us all that needed to be done, something only he could do. His love for humanity was “so great that it turned God against himself, his love against his justice,” said Pope Benedict XVI. It was so great “that by becoming Man he followed him even into death, and so reconciled justice and love.”
Some argue that we need not keep all the commandments all the time as long as we maintain our “fundamental option” for God. They suggest examining our consciences by balancing good deeds against bad.
Similarly, some husbands think “casual” extra-marital affairs do not matter as long as they do not divorce their wives; some wives think they can fantasize about other men as long as they do not commit adultery.
However, “we do not go to Hell only by being unfaithful to the free self-commitment which we have made to God,” Pope St. John Paul II said: we also lose salvation “by any other mortal sin.” It is only through Christ’s graciousness, who, the day he rose from the dead, instituted the sacrament of reconciliation, that we escape hell.
The truth is, with every moral choice we make, we acquire, bit by bit, the habits of heavenly creatures, who will be at home in heaven with God, or hellish creatures, who will spend eternity hating God, their fellow humans, and themselves.
As we rejoice today, let us not neglect the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English,” with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays (2 – 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and Mondays (10 a.m. – noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver). The title of the presentation next week is God: Unity and Trinity. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
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