3rd Sunday of Advent, Year A, 2016

May you experience the powerful presence of God in your life that not only fills you with joy and gladness but also makes you an instrument in the hand of Jesus Christ in his messianic, salvific, and redemptive work. Happy Sunday! + John I. Okoye

                                     DOCTRINE AND FAITH

(Isaiah 35,1-6a,8a-10; ,1-5; James 5,7-10; Matt 11,2-11; 3rd Sunday of Advent, Year A, 2016)

The third Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of joy and happiness. The liturgy invites us to rejoice. The entrance antiphon, citing a verse of Paul’s letter to the Philippians reads: Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice. Why? This is because the Lord is near. This invitation to be joyous is further advocated in the first reading, where Isaiah bases the call for the joy he proposes on the transforming presence of God. To the humiliated and anguished people of Israel, who were languishing in exile in Babylon, without any hope of returning to their homeland, Isaiah addressed the message of God’s intervention: Look your God is coming …he is coming to save. This oracle of salvation would manifest in two levels: natural and human. The salvation promised will be seen first in the regeneration of the natural world. Creation will be transformed and renewed. The promised renewal would be characterised by images of wastelands bursting forth with life. Thus the unproductive deserts, parched-lands and the steppes, all around Jordan’s rift valley would be blessed with the kind of fertility and productivity for which areas around Lebanon and the Plain of Sharon, in the northern part of the country were renowned. What was lifeless will now be abundantly fruitful, a sign of God’s blessing. On the restoration on the human plain, the oracle describes the transforming power of God in four healing situations: eyes, ears, legs and tongue. The healing was regarded as a testimony of God’s presence in the world and his victory over evil. God had re-established the original order of creation, and all life began again to flourish. What would be the reaction of the beneficiaries of God’s benevolent intervention those who return to their patria to whom Isaiah addressed the oracle of salvation? Regarding their release/ransom as unearned and unmerited, they would return home in joy and gladness. They will come to Zion shouting for joy, everlasting joy in their faces; joy and gladness will go with them and sorrow and lament be ended. The release from slavery was something absolutely unbelievable for the people who had suffered greatly and for a long period. It was a mirage! However, what seemed impossible was realised by God’s action

This prodigious intervention of God, the liberator of his people from their slavery and political servitude, is nothing less than a sign, a prefiguration of another intervention that is even more prodigious. This was the liberation from slavery of sin which God accomplished through his Son, Jesus Christ. Christ himself referred to the messianic signs of this intervention in his reply to the enquiry of John the Baptist about his messianic identity. Addressing the disciples of John the Baptist, Jesus said: Go back and tell John what you hear and see: the blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life. At the end of his citation of Isaiah’s he added: and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor… Good News, the Gospel, is fundamentally an announcement of an event that gives rise to joy and happiness. The Son of God, made the Good News available even to the marginalised poor of the society, bereft of the slightest idea of what joy and happiness signified. By citing Isaiah, Jesus was simply implying that he was fulfilling the prophecy which Isaiah proclaimed many centuries before. He was not responding to John the Baptist in a theoretical, abstract manner but in a concrete way and with facts which represented the transformation of the situation realised through his ministry. Thus, Jesus presented the signs of his messiahship, the signs that signalled God’s intervention in our world which brought remedy to sorrowful and painful situations. He was actually affirming: In me is the God who came to save you. In me, is manifest to you the glory and the magnificence of God.

Nowadays we Christians sometimes find ourselves in seemingly similar spiritual situation that the people of God of the Old Testament were: We are sometimes anguished because our faith is being attacked and belittled; or we fell completely lost on account of the increasing and expansion of evil forces and we are then hopeless, as it seems to us, that we are incapable of doing anything. In such situations the exhortation of Isaiah comes to be helpful, for it was not addressed only to the people of Israel of old but also to us: Have courage! Do not fear! Look your God is coming …to save you. By these words, Isaiah encouraged the fainthearted exiles in Babylonian servitude to patiently wait for God’s message of salvation through which he would usher new life. In our case and situation, God has already come. He is already in our midst and with us and will never abandon us. It is in this certitude of his transforming presence that we have to rediscover our confidence and serenity, no matter how bad the situation seems to be. Conscious fully and appreciative of God’s transforming presence in our midst, the full import of Paul’s exhortation in the entrance antiphon should become the refrain of our daily life. Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice. What is more, we are obliged then to let the refrain of joy and happiness we feel and enjoy radiate in our society. How? By joining Christ in the messianic campaign of making the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers be cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead be raised to life and the Good News be proclaimed to the poor…Any act of love and kindness shown to any needy neighbour (such needy neighbours abound in our midst) will be transformed by the power of God as source or joy and happiness to the recipient of such kind gestures. Blessed are you (surely, you will continue to be joyous and glad) that through you our needy neighbours will feel and enjoy the assuring presence of God in their lives. Happy Sunday! +John I. Okoye  

(pictures by chukwubike)