Don't Worry! Be Happy!

Third Sunday of Advent Year C

Christmas is just over a week away, and for many the air of excitement is just plain electrifying. For most of us, we can’t wait for it to happen! And yet, this season often ushers a troubling sense of melancholy. For many, they know that this should be a season of rejoicing but it doesn’t always feel this way for one reason or another. The children have left for overseas and the home feels like an empty nest. A particular loved one that had always been part of our annual Christmas celebrations is no longer here and it just doesn’t feel the same. Anxiety building up over the future - rising expenses, financial instabilities, a recently diagnosed ailment that could worsen within weeks and months. The call of today’s liturgy to “rejoice” seems to ring hollow. Is the Church calling us to excite ourselves, some form of self- delusional “syiok sendiri” (self-induced elation)?

The readings exhort, in fact, they command us to rejoice by using an entire list of synonymous verbs to express that exuberance: shout for joy, shout aloud, exult with all your heart, sing and shout for joy, give thanks to the Lord and who can forget St Paul’s “be happy!” In fact, Paul’s words in the second reading sound like that famous song by Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t worry! Be Happy!”

The Joy which the liturgy and readings speak of is not something which comes upon suddenly and instantaneously, like a shot of adrenaline or dopamine. This joy isn’t a sudden outburst. It has been building within us, the closer the Good News has drawn. This is the joy of all the ages bursting and singing forth, building up over the centuries, prophesied by the prophets, announced by St John the Baptist, knowing the Good News that is about to be bestowed upon us all. It can hardly be contained. In fact, it can’t be.

In the first reading, the prophet Zephaniah commands Jerusalem to rejoice and gives the reason for it. “The Lord has repealed your sentence; He has driven your enemies away. The Lord, the king of Israel, is in your midst; you have no more evil to fear.” Yes, we should have every reason to rejoice and celebrate because our Lord has forgiven our sins; He has removed the curse of Original Sin that laid like the Sword of Damocles over our heads; He has defeated our enemies - sin, death and the devil. But there is more. Zephaniah adds that God rejoices over us! With gladness! “The Lord your God is in your midst, a victorious warrior. He will exult with joy over you, He will renew you by His love; He will dance with shouts of joy for you as on a day of festival.” God is rejoicing over us and that should be a great reason if any for us to rejoice.

St Paul in the second reading lays down the reason why he wants us to be happy. Let’s start with the flip side of happiness which is unhappiness. What is the main cause of unhappiness? Paul tells us that it is anxiety - worries. We worry because we lack trust in God. And worry leads to unrest and the lack of peace which eventually leads to unhappiness. And that is the reason why St Paul tells us that the path to happiness is praying and placing our trust in the Lord: “There is no need to worry; but if there is anything you need, pray for it, asking God for it with prayer and thanksgiving, and that peace of God, which is so much greater than we can understand, will guard your hearts and your thoughts, in Christ Jesus.” Notice that Paul doesn’t promise that we will get what we prayed for. Our true reward, the answer to our prayer is the “peace of God, which is so much greater than we can understand.”

This is the reason why we can still rejoice when things do not seem to be going our way or according to our plans, when we are facing one crisis or another, when we have suffered loss and are experiencing loneliness and alienation. Because as long as we do not lose faith in God and continue to persevere in pray, the “peace of God, which is so much greater than we can understand, will guard your hearts and your thoughts, in Christ Jesus.” Peace is not the absence of conflict or problems. Peace involves presence rather than absence. It comes with the acknowledgement that God is in our midst, “a victorious warrior. He will exult with joy over you, He will renew you by His love; He will dance with shouts of joy for you as on a day of festival.”

And finally, we come to the gospel and the final herald of joy, St John the Baptist. John doesn’t strike us as a Pollyanna-like optimistic figure. In fact, he strikes us as quite the opposite. Solemn, sombre and rigidly kill-joy. Unlike the other two figures we encountered in the first and the second reading, John does not burst forth in a cheer leader’s rallying cry exhorting us to rejoice. On the contrary, he provides strict moral guidance to his audience to share, to avoid greed and intimidation and then uses apocalyptic language of judgment to speak of the One who is coming, one who is superior to John and who “will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fan is in his hand to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his barn; but the chaff he will burn in a fire that will never go out.”

The idea of judgment - separation of the wheat from the chaff and the destruction of the latter - does not naturally inspire joy. And yet St Luke describes this message as “good news”! And it is good news because it expresses the fundamental preparatory work of John - calling his listeners to repentance, to separate themselves from the chaff of sin. And before we think of the image of fire pointing to the eternal hell fire which all damned unrepentant souls must endure for eternity, we must also remember that fire represents the Holy Spirit which we receive in Baptism and a greater outpouring at Confirmation. Fire too represents the purgative element of God’s love, refining us, purifying us, restoring us, beautifying us. The prophet Zephaniah alluded to this in the first reading when he prophesied the Lord’s coming into our midst to “renew” us by His love.

So, as the weeks of Advent draw to a close and the days and nights of December lead us closer to that solemn night where our Lord and Saviour was born in the City of David, let us not choose to wallow in self-pity or crippling worries. We are commanded today to rejoice, and we do so not by finding substitutes to Christ in the form of intoxicants or other means of entertainment. Lasting joy cannot be found in any human pursuits but in God alone. He alone gives us the joy we seek.