Attaining Joy: Homily for Gaudete Sunday 2024

3rd Sunday of Advent, C                                                                                 December 15, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert                                                               St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville

“Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee O Israel.” It’s hard to pick just one hymn as a favorite, but that’s a contender. Profound meaning, a great tune, a deep connection to tradition, and it’s always sung in my favorite season, especially on one of my favorite days of the year: Gaudete Sunday, which literally means “rejoice.” Our second reading follows that theme by telling us, commanding us to rejoice.

How, though? To understand how, it will help to reflect on just what joy is. We have some intuitive understanding of it, but we need to sort it out among all the other words we use to describe “feeling good.” We can think of it kind of like a spectrum. There’s pleasure, there’s happiness or contentment, there’s joy, and then there is beatitude. That last one only exists in heaven, but it helps to remember it’s there.

Pleasure is the simplest and lowest on the spectrum. Pleasure is when we satisfy some basic physical, emotional, or psychological instinct. Eating a good meal, physical affection, listening to great music. These and more can bring pleasure. For the most part, pleasure is fleeting. It’s good in the appropriate amounts, times, and places, but it’s hardly the highest form of “feeling good.” Enough pain and suffering can completely override pleasure, making it very hard to hold on to.

Happiness or contentment comes from attaining some goal or good thing. Pleasure is often part of happiness, but we can find happiness even in the midst of pain when we see the sacrifice as worth it for some higher goal. Landing a big promotion after a lot of work or winning the big game through pain and exhaustion can bring a kind of happiness. We are happy that VC won the championship. There’s video proof of just how excited I got. People will – and should – tell stories of that game for decades. Praise God and may he use it for his glory and our good!

Not all happiness is the same, however. You know that winning the game was is not the highest form of happiness. A less intense, yet deeper and more lasting form of happiness comes from achieving real goodness: your children thriving in the home you’ve provided for them or the quiet contentment of work done well regardless of who knows it. These are the kinds of happiness you can build a whole life around.

Yet, even here is a limitation: happiness often depends on things beyond our control. Injuries can ruin games, disasters wipe out homes, disease take away our ability to work. It’s hard to find happiness when you find yourself unable to achieve anything “valuable.”

This is what sets joy apart. Joy can survive and grow when things go wrong and the world takes away our happiness. It would be cruel for the bible and the Church to command us to rejoice if joy was sometimes impossible. Where pleasure is mostly in the body and happiness mostly in the mind, joy is mostly in the heart… or perhaps we should say soul. Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. What that means is that it both comes from God and is not something we can aim at directly.

So, no, you can’t just decide to be joyful. Of course, you can’t just decide to win a football game, either. You have to do a whole bunch of things to lead up to that. Winning is the byproduct of many decisions as well as factors beyond our control. Joy, however, is ultimately the byproduct of the same decision made many times: the decision to do the will of God. If that sounds dull or underwhelming, let’s rephrase it: Joy is the byproduct of the repeated decision to love. That’s what God’s will is: love. Not puppy love, not emotional attachment, but the sustained choice to do what glorifies God and what is genuinely good for others.

When St. Paul tells us to rejoice, he is telling us to recognize and remember that way that God’s choice to love us and our ability to love him back can survive pain, suffering, tragedy, and even death. To live for God’s will is to live with the Holy Spirit. Joy is the fruit of that ongoing, lived relationship with the God who is Love. Though we cannot choose to feel joy at any given moment, we can always choose to love God. And doing so produces a joy deeper than mere emotion.

When I was in seminary, we were given various apostolates and pastoral opportunities. One year, I was given the task of regularly visiting a nursing facility with some severely disabled people. One middle-aged man was completely bound to a bed, and utterly dependent on round-the-clock care. He had every reason to be miserable, but every time I walked in his room, he wasn’t just okay, he was joyful. “How you doing today?” “God is so good, my man!” I’d spend a little time with him and he was always speaking of God’s goodness, telling me about Jesus and how incredibly blessed he was. Blessed? Despite never leaving his room, usually lying in the dark, and often being alone, he considered himself blessed. How? Love. He chose to love God regardless of his situation. He chose to love me, to greet me enthusiastically, to pray for me, encourage my vocation, and speak to me of how good God is. So, he found joy. He chose joy by choosing to love.

Today’s gospel is kind of a funny choice for the theme of joy. We don’t see it, but right before this passage, John the Baptist is berating people for their sins, calling them vipers and threatening them with hellfire. We pick up with them struck by mortal fear, asking what it takes to get back to joy. And what does John tell them to do? “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.” Stop stealing, stop extorting, work honestly. In other words, choose to love the people around you!

John the Baptist builds up so much anticipation that people wonder if he might be the messiah. He’s not and he points them beyond himself. Pleasure and happiness are often like that, but they are mere shadows, the tiniest foretaste of real joy and beatitude. We experience great pleasure or intense happiness and, perhaps without realizing it, we start to treat the source of that happiness – food, affection, sports, jobs – we treat them like messiahs, like gods, like idols. Look beyond them!

Do not equate pleasure and happiness with joy. The real test comes with suffering. If the thing that gives you happiness cannot survive suffering, it is not yet joy. Certainly joy does not want to suffer, but real joy can survive and even increase in the midst of suffering. As Mother Teresa once put it, “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” And that increased love means even greater joy, whether or not the world can measure the so-called “success” or “effectiveness” of that love. That bedridden man loved and had joy despite most of the world considering it pointless.

So yes, take pleasure in the good things. Work hard and be happy and content when living life well brings you success. But do not confuse these for true joy. Whether you’re happy or not, whether it’s pleasant or not, rejoice! Remember that Emmanuel – God with us – loves you enough to be born a child, to suffer and die for you, to come again in glory to bring you to himself. When pleasure lets us down, when happiness seems out of reach, when anxiety threatens to prevent our joy, take St. Paul’s advice: “by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.” Do that knowing he has already done so much for you because he loves you. Then, whether it’s pleasant or not, “successful” or not, choose to love him in return, to sincerely seek his will for you, and to love those made in his image. Do this and you will know joy.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *