God rejoices over us – Zeph 3:14-18a, Phil 4:4-7

Advent Week 3, Year C; St. Casimir's parish.

The letter we heard from Paul, the letter to the Philippians, was written from prison. Roman prisons varied from place to place, but we can reconstruct with some probability what it might have looked like, smelt like, to be in that prison: it meant no sun light; it meant no heat if this was a winter’s night, no form of cooling if it was a summer’s day; it meant no way of getting rid of sewage; it meant regular beatings; it meant witnessing suicide and spontaneous executions and knowing you could be next.  But, there’s a reason this letter was chosen form us to read from on this Sunday, Gaudete Sunday, Rejoice Sunday, when the church lifts up ‘joy’ as and Advent theme. From prison, Paul writes the most joyful letter we have from him.

Rejoice, he cries out. Rejoice because the Lord is near. Paul is led to joy because he’s sustained by the kind of promise we heard from the prophet Zephaniah in our first reading. Zephaniah dreams of a day when God will rejoice over us, and his dream is prophetic: it speaks forth something deeply true.  He pictures God so joyful over us that He sings out with joy, as at a festival. We all love being praised I think, but this is something deeper than that, more exuberant than that. It’s joy. Think of a dog’s joy when a master returns home. Only this is the other way round, it’s our master’s joy when we return home. It’s God’s unrestrained joy poured out over us, all the more special because it’s God who brought us home.

One of my favorite lines of the whole Mass is the prayer the priest says after the Our Father before the sign of peace: “Look not upon our sins, Lord, but upon the face of your Church.” This is a thoroughly childish prayer, in the most brilliantly Christian sense. It’s the kid saying “Daddy, Daddy, look at this!” “Look at our faith.” “Rejoice at our faith.” We know we don’t have it all together, we acknowledge the existence of sins we ask God not, at that moment, to look at, and we ask him to look at what we do have, what brought us together here together this morning, our faith, even if it’s the size of a mustard seed, and we invite Him to rejoice over it. We’ll show God other things at other times. At times, we’ll approach him like a physician and say, “look at my wound, heal it.” But at that moment, we ask him to look at our faith with rejoicing and we taste in a real way what we will know far more fully in the world to come, God’s exuberant joy.

Paul has a deep deep conviction that the coming of the Lord will mean coming to know more fully that exuberant joy as God delights in him. And he knows there’s things he’ll have to be cleansed of, but his fear of that is quelled by his joyful anticipation of receiving God’s joy. That’s what enables him to rejoice in a dark smelly painful prison. That’s how he invites the Philippians to do the same. That’s how he invites us to do that. And he invites that joy to change us.

Zechariah says that that joy, God’s joy, will renew us in our love.  God doesn’t rejoice because we’ve got this loving-people business down pat, he rejoices, because it’s only in His joy that our love can be strengthened to the point that we can love like Him. It’s that assurance that we are incalculably valued, immeasurably loved, giddily rejoiced over that frees us for courageous love.

It’s from this that John the Baptist’s answers to the people’s questions come from. He has proclaimed that the Lord is near, that good news of God’s closeness, and the reality of that joy being at hand is what can lead us to the kinds of virtues that John called the people from. He called them to generosity, he called them to justice, he called them to lay aside using their power to grasp more than they needed. Joy is what enables that. Our joy, that flows from the knowledge of God’s joy.

It’s interesting that John doesn’t tell the people to withdraw to the desert like he had. He tells them to go back to their regular lives, but be different in those lives, be renewed in love, be transformed by joy. As we prepare for the joy of celebrating Christmas, it might be worth asking the question the crowds asked John, “What should we do?” Joy isn’t meant to be just a fleeting emotion, a momentary high, it’s meant to transform us. What might need transforming in our lives? How can joy strengthen us to do that?

Last week, we heard Paul’s assurance that the Lord will bring to completion the good work he has begun in us. I think that can be a good way to ask this question. Start by rejoicing, with thanksgiving over the good work the Lord has begun in you, and vividly imagine God’s joy over your real, even if limited response. And then, only once you’ve sat with that bubbling over joy for a while, ask, “what should we do?” What needs completing in this work God has begun? The joy can strengthen to approach that question with generosity.