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12 December 2010

Rejoicing in Hope

HOMILY
3rd Sunday of Advent – A – 12 December 2010

Readings: Is 35:1-6; Ps 146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10; Jas 5:7-10; Mt 11:2-11

It’s 13 days to go before Christmas, and we get a feel of Christmas joy in the liturgy this Gaudete Sunday.

Gaudete comes from Phil 4,4-6, which is the introduction to the Mass today: “Gaudéte in Dómino semper.” “Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! Your kindness should be known to all. The Lord is near. Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.”

1. Rejoicing in Hope

“Good theology stimulates and inflames the intellect. Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan add that it also helps to move the will. The heart needs to have some intellectual vision. Good ideas play no small part in any healthy change. Thus, the Christian community is always in need of good academics. As history shows, every time the Church has compromised on its intellectual tradition, seeing it as unimportant, it has paid a heavy price. Good, sound, abstract, academic theology is perennially the great corrective within church life and spirituality.

More recently, we have been blessed with an abundance of good theology... We are not lacking for solid ideas. What we are lacking however, is fire, romance, aesthetics, as these pertain to our faith and ecclesial lives. What needs to be inflamed today inside religion is its romantic imagination. Solid ideas and solid programs alone are not enough. We need someone to re-inflame the romantic imagination of Christianity, a new Francis, a new Clare, a new Augustine, a new Thomas More, a new Ignatius, a new Therese of Lisieux.”

Ronald Rolheiser, "Secularity and the Gospel"