Gaudete Sunday

Nativity (CCL 2.0 Paul)

Tomorrow is the Third Sunday in Advent, also known as Gaudete Sunday. And gaudete means, in case your high school was (like mine) so shortsighted as to not teach Latin, “Hey, everyone! Rejoice!” So it’s startling to find that the Gospel reading for Sunday in the Book of Common Prayer deals with John the Baptizer’s doubts and profound disillusionment.

Are you really the Promised One, John asks Jesus, or should we look for someone else? It’s a weird passage for Joyful Sunday. False expectations and the disappointment and disillusionment that inevitably follow don’t quite seem to fit.

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My Beloved spoke to me . . . 
"Arise, My darling, My beautiful one,
Come away with me.
O My dove, in the clefts of the rock,
In the secret place of the steep pathway,
Let Me see your face; let Me hear your voice.
For your voice is sweet and your face is lovely.

(Song of Songs 2.13f)

What kind of lover invites his darling to a tryst on a steep, difficult path through solid rock? It reminds me of St. Teresa of Ávila’s retort to Jesus: “If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few of them.”

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Disillusionment and crushing disappointment don’t seem to fit with joy. But the Baptizer had to lose his illusions about Jesus (which must have been devastating) before he could truly get to know the Jesus who was (and is). 

I want to let disillusionment be the end of the relational road, with God and with people. (She’s not who I thought she was. He didn’t keep his promises. I’m done.) But disillusionment is probably always a prerequisite to intimacy. Until I’m disillusioned, I embrace the illusions rather than the person who is actually there: broken, in your case and mine, enigmatic and inscrutable, in Jesus’s. 

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I go, Jesus tells His disciples at the Last Supper, to prepare a place for you: a place, as Revelation describes it, with streets of gold, Trees of Life, and a God who will gently wipe the tears from our eyes.

Before we get to Revelation’s happy ending, though, we sit through the ultimate disaster movie. World war. Famine. Pandemics. Ecological catastrophe. We watch a woman, often thought to represent the Church, flee into the desert, pursued by a terrifying seven-headed dragon. The desert is a place that’s hard to stay alive in: no surprise there. But it also turns out to be, John tells us, a place prepared for her by God, where she will be taken care of.

Jesus is lovingly preparing a Home for us. He’s also preparing, with love, the hard places along the way, the places we never wanted to find ourselves, never imagined being. Even, somehow, the places we end up in because evil won this round.

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Letting go of expectations and illusions hurts. But when we have to—and we do, over and over again—we’d best let go of all of them. The dreams of perfection and the temptation to resignation and despair. The grand story of Christianity says that there's more to everything than meets the eye. That a naked peasant in agony on a cross was, as Paul tells the church in Colossae, disarm[ing] the [supernatural] powers and authorities, triumphing over them, in His dying.

Part of our pilgrimage seems to involve learning to do that in the micro of our own lives as well as in the macro of His, reminding ourselves that the painful places, the heartbreaking places, the scary and lonely places, even the places that are the result of human error or indifference or cruelty, are also somehow places prepared for us, in love, by God. (You meant it for evil, Joseph tells his brothers who sold him into slavery, but God meant it for good.) The steep, rocky path is a place where we can meet our Lover in secret. The desolate desert is a place where, somehow, we will be taken care of.

Hey, everyone: Rejoice!