“In these times when so much is happening around us, good and bad, we are called to recognize Christ in our midst”
The Third Sunday of Advent is also called “Gaudete Sunday” which in Latin means “rejoice.”
It reminds us that this season of advent is a time for rejoicing because the day of our salvation is near.
God has revealed himself to us by being born into this world to redeem us from the bondage of sin.
Tomorrow’s Gospel brings us back to the narrative on John the Baptist.
When asked who he was, John replied: “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord!”
Our God is a merciful God.
There is no sin so grave as to be beyond pardon.
His love is infinite and unfathomable.
While men’s capacity to forgive may be finite and his sense of justice often perverted, God’s love is limitless and his justice perfect.
With the war in Gaza, we see genocide being invoked against Hamas and Israel.
Indeed, this war reminds me of a visit I made to the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in Poland in 2018.
The gate of the Auschwitz camp proclaims — “Arbeit macht frei,’ a German phrase meaning “work sets you free.”
The more appropriate phrase would have been: “Death shall set you Free.”
Because in these camps alone, more than a million and a half people — communists, liberal democrats, the Roma, homosexuals, and, most of all, the vast majority, Jews from all over Europe brought in cattle/freight cars in what is now described as holocaust trains — lost their lives here.
Auschwitz was built first; in a way; it was an experiment on how to do genocide.
The Nazis liked what they saw and so they built Birkenau, a much bigger camp.
The inscription in the Birkenau Memorial at the end of the railway and just beside the gassing chamber and crematorium where thousands were killed every day is direct to the point: “For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children mainly Jews from various countries of Europe.”
The massacre of the innocents of Israel last Oct. 7 and in the devastation that the Israeli Defense Forces have waged in Gaza which have resulted in nearly 20,000 deaths, most innocents as well, cannot be compared to the Holocaust in scale but it is still monstrous and terrible.
In the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, because I was actually in Poland in 2018 for a climate conference, I also could not help but relate what happened there in World War II with what is and will be happening in the places that will be worst hit by climate calamities arising from human selfishness.
The failure in Dubai early this week to come up with a strongest agreement possible to phase out fossil fuels makes this more possible.
Where are we human beings in a world with so much evil and suffering?
This is the message of Gaudete Sunday. We can only rejoice if we see though our sinfulness, if we confront the evil in and among us.
In this Season of Joy, we can only recognize Christ in the manger if, like John the Baptist, our hearts and minds are not burdened with selfishness, greed, ambition, and all forms of moral baggage that becloud our soul into seeing both majesty and mercy of Christ. We must wear the vest of charity, selflessness, trust and total dependence in God and most of all love which is the greatest of all virtues.
In these times when so much is happening around us, good and bad, we are called to recognize Christ in our midst and discern his divine will.
In every event that occurs in our personal lives and the life of our nation, we must pray that we will see things from the perspective of our faith in the Lord and try to understand what he is trying to tell us.
As God is the God of history, he is also the God of forgiveness and providence, and most of all the God of love and joy.
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