3rd Sunday of Advent, Year B
First Reading: Is 61:1-2a, 10-11
Second Reading: 1 Thes 5:16-24
Gospel Reading: Jn 1:6-8, 19-28
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice! The Lord is near,” we say in the Entrance Antiphon this Sunday, often called Gaudete (“Rejoice”) Sunday.
We should rejoice as we approach Christmas, for Jesus comes “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
God loves us. In fact, he “would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
For example, it notes that illness, like the present pandemic, which is a grave physical evil, can help us discern what is essential in our lives and lead us to God.
“God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil,” the Catechism stresses. However, physical evil is part of his plan.
Creation “did not spring forth complete from the hands of the Creator,” the Catechism notes. “With infinite wisdom and goodness, God freely willed to create a world in a state of journeying toward its ultimate perfection,” a journey that involves “both constructive and destructive forces of nature,” “physical evil” as well as “physical good.”
“I form the light, and create the darkness,” God says; “I make well-being and create woe: I, the Lord, do all these things.”
“It is I who bring both death and life, I Who inflict wounds and heal them.”
“Good and evil, life and death, poverty and riches, are from the Lord.”
We might ask why, but we could not understand the answer, for it would have to span all the history of the entire universe. Before our Creator, whose ways are as high above ours “as the heavens are above the earth,” we can only say, with Job, that “we accept good things from God; and should we not accept evil?”
We must be very careful in trying to account for our current suffering in terms of moral evil. It “cannot be divorced” from what St. John calls the “sin of the world,” but the connection is “complex,” Pope St. John Paul II warned. It is true that when suffering “is connected with a fault,” it “has a meaning as punishment,” but “it is not true that all suffering is a consequence of a fault and has the nature of a punishment.”
We must not try to excuse God for physical evil, as if, in some sense, he cannot help it. On the contrary, the care with which he guides creation toward its ultimate perfection is “concrete,” “immediate,” and universal, says the Catechism. “God cares for all, from the least things to the great events of the world and its history.” The universe “remains wholly subject to him and at his disposal.”
It is right, then, for us to “rejoice always” and “give thanks in all circumstances,” as St. Paul urges in the Second Reading, not just when “everything’s going my way,” but also when it is not.
“We firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history,” the Catechism says. Sometimes we can see it for ourselves, as when captives are freed and the brokenhearted consoled. However, much of the time, the ways of God’s providence are hidden from us, as during the current pandemic. Evil and suffering can make it seem that God is absent or incapable of stopping them.
Not until the end of the world will we be able to see the whole of God’s loving plan and know fully how He has guided his creation to the perfection for which he created it, even through evil and sin, says the Catechism. In the meantime, through faith, we must “embrace,” even if we cannot understand, “the mysterious ways of God’s almighty power.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” free of charge. All the materials (video and print) are available online at www.beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 15, “The Communion Among the Saints in the Body of Christ,” will be available December 13.