The Hard Sayings of Gaudete Sunday

Brothers and sisters:
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.
Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding
will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Rejoice in the Lord always. Have no anxiety. These are some of the hardest words in Scripture. How do we rejoice when our spirits are in darkness? How refrain from anxiety when all creation seems to tremble with uncertainty? A cursory glance at the news – at the bigotry, violence, and fear – is enough to make us wonder. Is St. Paul naïve beyond belief?

Beyond belief, perhaps – what he proposes “surpasses…understanding” – yet perhaps not so naïve as we might feel. Not only did he write this while imprisoned – experiencing persecution from outside the Church – but there were envy and rivalry within the Church herself. And his initial response – which he iterates again in today’s Gaudete Sunday reading – is the double affirmation of joy; what matters is “that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice. Yes, and I will continue to rejoice.” (Phil. 1: 18b, NRSVCE).

It is a prayer and hope rather than an assertion of immediate fact; joy is perilous and precarious. The implacability of joy can steamroll the broken hearted, and must be handled with care; our kindness should be known to all. Yet it is not something rare and impossible, encountered only in far off, perfected circumstances. The Lord is near.

Such joy does not ignore reality – asserting “peace, where there is no peace” – but rather surpasses understanding, opening a spiritual imaginary wherein Christ rather than the violence about us determines reality. The realism of this perspective hangs on thanksgiving, the ability to see beyond the world that appears, to the world that is given. In the Greek of today’s reading, the word for thanksgiving is the root of the word “Eucharist,” signifying the place where the matter of the fallen world is transformed from lapse to glory. It is this that determines us, and protects our hearts and minds from the cynicism we would otherwise develop as a shell against a shattered world.

What is shattered is repaired in Eucharist – thanksgiving – and joy in this instance is not a matter of elation, but of making quiet space in our hearts for this Eucharist, this place where even the darkest of darknesses is transformed. The peace that relies on understanding alone sees only darkness, but the peace that passes understanding knows light, and it is this latter we must know in ourselves. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…” During Advent, this is our prayer.