Gaudate Sunday - today

The third Sunday of Advent (that’s today) is called Gaudete Sunday. It gets this name from the first word of the Introit at Mass, Gaudete in Domine Semper – Rejoice in the Lord always.

Advent was originally a forty-day fast in preparation for Christmas, beginning on the day after St Martin’s day (12 November). Advent goes back as far as the 5th century, but probably not further because there’s no evidence of Christmas being kept on 25 December before the end of the fourth century. The Advent fast was shortened to four weeks in the 9th century, and by the twelfth century the fast had been replaced by simple abstinence. Gregory the Great (~540-604) was the first to create an Office (a daily service) for the Advent season and Masses for the Sundays of Advent. In both Office and Mass provision is made for five Sundays, but by the tenth century four was the usual number, though some churches of France observed five as late as the thirteenth century. Despite all the messing about with the length and the practices in Advent, it has always had the characteristics of a penitential season – like Lent, a season for waiting on God, for purification, or in contemporary terms, a time for self-assessment and bringing your life into order under the guidance of God and your spiritual guides.

There’s another similarity between Lent and Advent. The middle (third) Sunday of Advent (that’s today), like Mothering Sunday in the middle of Lent, has traditionally been a day for breaking the fast. In Churches, flowers and musical instruments were once forbidden during Advent and Lent, but on the middle Sunday they were permitted to be used, and priests and deacons would wear rose-coloured vestments were allowed instead of purple or black. Some churches use red candles in their Advent wreaths; to me that always seems as if it’s making Christmas come too soon. I prefer the practice of using purple ones; but if you go and buy a purple set, you’ll find that the third one is usually pink instead of purple, to mark Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete Sunday is a reminder that Advent is passing, and that the Lord’s coming is near. The focus today is more on the Second coming than on the first – more about Maranatha than Incarnation – and so the theme for the day is one of intense joy and gladness, and heightened expectation. So today, on Gaudete Sunday, the spirit of penitence in preparation for Christmas and the coming Messiah is suspended in favour of a joyful anticipation of the Promised Redemption – the already (even though it’s not yet) that permeates the entire mindset of the Christian believer.

It’s no simple thing to make sense of a faith that has a long tradition while the world all around us has changed. The language of the Christian faith includes stuff fromn the Bible that is as much as three thousand years old, and ideas that have been worked and re-worked through a number of eras – the dark ages, the middle ages, and so on. How do we make sense of Gaudete Sunday when we live in a world with a twenty-first century cosmology, a hadron collider, the latest in hubble space telescopes, in the year when the celebration of Darwin has been everywhere? How can faith be believable and rational as well as faithful?


Some do still take the “already-not-yet” of Christian thought quite literally, believing that one day the sky will somehow literally split open and Christ will return. But many take the biblical language as being of its time, and weave the underlying truths together with a modern, scientific view of the world – which means to say that you can recognise where the interpretation of earlier times is what we would consider magical or supersititious, without trashing the important, lifegiving thread of truth that runs through the faith. You don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The most important element in the underlying escahtological promise is not the strange apocalyptic visions of the sixth century BC, or the second century AD, or the overlay of medieval superstition, but the fact that Christian theology opened up a way of looking forward in hope to a better future, rather than taking a negative, nihilistic view of the world.

With thanks to Maggi Dawn - from her blog.