Two weeks to Christmas!
I remember that as a child it was about this time that Christmas started to seem close, the excitement grew, the wondering what presents were coming.
We get some of the same sense of excitement, of expectation, in the people in Luke’s account of John the Baptist (Lk 3:10-18). Even the hard-bitten soldiers and tax-collectors are caught up in the sense of something about to happen. Change is in the air.
It’s hard to recover that sense of excitement. We’re no longer children, too many Christmases have come and gone. We don’t have the good fortune to be present at the moment when Jesus was actually coming into the world, either as baby or as preacher. Yes we may look forward to Christmas, although some may find it hard to do even that. Christmas can be a time that brings out out difficulties and memories of unhappy as well as happy times. It is another Christmas.
Another year, another Christmas.
Yet this is Gaudete Sunday. Zephaniah says “Shout for joy, O daughter Zion!” (Zep 3:14-18a). In place of the usual psalm we have a passage from Isaiah telling us “Cry out with joy and gladness” (Is 12:2-3, 4, 5-6.) Gaudete is not an invitation – it is a command. We are told to rejoice. So what to do?
It may help to remember that even as children Christmas was not a surprise. We knew there had been previous Christmases and would be more – but that didn’t stop us feeling excited about this one. Maybe we thought it was going to be the best one ever, but that wasn’t really the point – this was the one that was happening now.
And what about those Israelites, and the Jews listening to John the Baptist? They knew that God had saved them before – from the Flood, from Egypt, from the Philistines, from the Assyrians, from the Babylonians, from so many trials and misfortunes. John’s audience had no understanding that Jesus was special, the unique son of God. They didn’t even know who Jesus was, they could easily confuse John with Jesus. Zephaniah and Isaiah for their part were not fazed by the fact they were repeating a familiar message. Nor were they talking about some future event. Isaiah says “for among you is the great and Holy One of Israel” – here and now. Their command to rejoice was in celebration of the current moment, the current event.
So maybe we have to think less about all the other Christmases, the sense that we’ve been here before, that we can’t feel quite like the people of Jesus’s time, for whom it was all new, the first time (it wasn’t).
We have this Christmas, we have this celebration of the birth of Jesus, of the extraordinary fact that God became human and lived among us – and lives with us now. This is the time to rejoice. Christmas is coming now. Forget other Christmases, forget what has come before and is yet to come. We have this moment, in this year. It is now that Jesus comes to us. We should indeed rejoice.