Third Sunday of Advent, 12/8

Today is an unusual day within the Church. It is only one of two days that the Church prescribes the color “rose” to its liturgy. Corresponding with that is the lighting of the rose-colored candle of the Advent wreath. For those brought up in the Catholic Church, it is likely that the older we get the more accustomed we have become to this particular custom of lighting the rose candle on the Third Sunday of the Advent season. However, buried under these years of growing up and maybe losing a bit of the sense of awe and wonder with life, I suspect that the lighting of this simple pink candle still stirs within us a subtle, but profound, movement within the heart. Why is that?

You could say it is nostalgia, and I suppose that wouldn’t be wrong. But, I do think there is more—something much deeper going on. I would categorize it with my favorite word from our Gospel today: Expectation.

Luke points out that “the people were filled with expectation.” Why? Because they thought that John might be the one they were waiting for—the Christ, the anointed one. Of course, we know that they were mistaken, and John points it out to them quickly. But while they were mistaken as to who the Christ was, they were not mistaken in their expectation nor in the hope of the promise of God to send them one who would save them. These men and women, like us, had grown up hearing the promises of God as children. And though they had suffered many hardships and persecutions, and though the world would tell them over and over that their expectations were futile, they did not let their hope in God be robbed from their hearts. They longed for peace, they longed for charity, they longed for the salvation promised to them, they longed for their God.

Advent is the season of this longing expectation. It is the season in which the finger of God breaks through the hardened exterior shells to reawaken his children’s hearts in order to keep us from losing the hope which once stirred within us—the hope that his coming really has changed everything.

 Michael Gokie, SCV