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December 15, 2024, is the third Sunday of Introduction, recognized in many Christian traditions as Gaudete Sunday.
The title stems from the Latin Vulgate translation of Philippians 4:4: Gaudete in Domino semper. Our English translation reads, “Rejoice within the Lord all the time.”
This explicit Sunday marks a flip within the Introduction liturgy. For the earlier two weeks, our focus has been on ready, making ready and repenting, symbolized by the deep purple candles on the Introduction wreath. However they’re changed by the rose-colored candle, a vivid image of pleasure breaking into the darkness. Gaudete Sunday reminds us that the coming of Christ is — because the angel introduced to the shepherds — excellent news of nice pleasure.
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At first look, the decision to “rejoice all the time” or, in some translations, to “rejoice in all circumstances” could appear odd. The circumstances round us don’t all the time appear to warrant rejoicing. The fact of evil and struggling on this planet is simple.
Introduction serves as a reminder that we permit the sunshine of Christ to shine into even the darkest occasions of our lives. FILE: The 33-metre-high Christmas tree, which got here from the forest of southern Austria, is formally lit throughout a ceremony because it rains in St. Peter’s Sq., in entrance of Basilica on the Vatican December 13, 2008. (REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi)
However Paul was no stranger to this actuality when he gave us this encouragement. Whipped, overwhelmed, stoned, shipwrecked and left for useless, he was intimately acquainted with struggling. And but Paul, in meeting the risen Christ, had skilled a foretaste of a actuality deeper even than the struggling he endured. Certainly, he skilled a pleasure so profound that it reworked even his biggest struggling into what he known as a “mild momentary affliction” when in comparison with the “everlasting weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17).
That is the excellence between happiness and Christian pleasure. Happiness ebbs and flows with the tides of current circumstances. However pleasure is one thing extra abiding. It’s a lasting fruit of the Holy Spirit’s enduring presence in our lives – transcending our conditions and steadfast, even in sorrow.
I’ve seen this actuality firsthand in my position as president of Pepperdine College. Only recently, our Malibu campus and group confronted the specter of worry and loss because the Franklin Hearth burned close to campus. And in recent times, now we have walked via a few of the darkest occasions in our group’s historical past — the isolation and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the devastation of the Woolsey Hearth and 2023’s heartbreaking lack of 4 college students alongside the Pacific Coast Freeway. The load of those sorts of tragedies can’t be overstated. The darkness is palpable and actual.
And but I’ve been inspired past measure to witness our campus strolling via tragedy and issue in a means that acknowledges the burden of struggling with out being overcome by it. I’ve seen our college students, school and workers stroll alongside each other, pray for each other and weep with each other. In doing so, they’ve proven that deep mourning isn’t inconsistent with deep pleasure. We’ve got skilled the reality that in bearing each other’s burdens, we permit the sunshine of Christ to shine into even the darkest occasions of our lives.
That is the paradox of Introduction. Christ entered the struggling and darkness of the human expertise — to not escape it, however to rework it. The prophet Isaiah foretold:
“He was despised and rejected by mankind, a person of struggling, and conversant in ache.
Like one from whom folks disguise their faces, he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Certainly he took up our ache and bore our struggling, but we thought-about him punished by God, laid low with him, and troubled. However he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that introduced us peace was on him, and by his wounds we’re healed (Isaiah 53:3-5).”
Christ not solely entered the world’s struggling; He introduced into it His unconquerable mild. As John writes: “In him was life, and that life was the sunshine of all mankind. The sunshine shines within the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
Saint Augustine reminds us in his magisterial work “The Metropolis of God” that evil has no actual lifetime of its personal. It’s, slightly, a parasite, a subtraction, a lessening of the great. Darkness can’t be mentioned to really exist — it’s merely the absence of sunshine. You received’t discover a “flash-dark” accessible alongside the flashlights at your native ironmongery shop. When a lamp is illuminated, shadows haven’t any selection however to flee.
When a light-weight shines within the darkness, the darkness can’t overcome it.
That is what we have fun on Gaudete Sunday. Lighting the rose-colored candle is greater than a ritual – it’s a proclamation of hope and pleasure. Like Andy Dufresne broadcasting Mozart to his fellow prisoners in “The Shawshank Redemption,” Christian pleasure is a sign to the world that there’s a actuality past the brokenness so evident round us. As Andy places it, “There’s one thing inside … that they cannot get to, that they cannot contact.”
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It’s a mild shining within the darkness.
As we mild the candle, we echo the phrases of the “Ode to Pleasure” — Friedrich Schiller’s hovering poem set to the triumphant ultimate motion of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The primary strains of the Ode learn:
Joyful, joyful, we like Thee,
God of glory, Lord of affection;
Hearts unfold like move’rs earlier than Thee,
Op’ning to the solar above.
Soften the clouds of sin and disappointment;
Drive the darkish of doubt away;
Giver of immortal gladness,
Fill us with the sunshine of day!
That is our prayer on this third Sunday of Introduction. We have fun the approaching of our Lord and Savior — our mild shining within the darkness. We reside within the already of His dying and resurrection, and we hope within the not but of His return. We rejoice, realizing now partially what we are going to quickly see in entire.
That is the paradox of Introduction. Christ entered the struggling and darkness of the human expertise — to not escape it, however to rework it. The prophet Isaiah foretold: “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a person of struggling, and conversant in ache.
Because the hymn concludes:
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Mortals, be a part of the mighty refrain,
Which the morning stars started;
Father love is reigning o’er us,
Brother love binds man to man.
Ever singing, march we onward,
Victors within the midst of strife,
Joyful music leads us Sunward
Within the triumph track of life.
Could we stroll ahead with the enjoyment of Christ resounding in our hearts and in our lives, each this Gaudete Sunday and every single day.
