March 10, 2024
-
My Dear Parishioners,
This Sunday is "Laetare Sunday.” "Laetare" means "rejoice."
Christian joy isn't based on merely human motives, and feelings. We human beings are flawed and fickle and we fail. Joy is based on God, who loves us thoroughly and powerfully right in the midst of our misery: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.” And so that we don’t remain detached and aloof from such profound truth, St, Paul gives this witness: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” We have been made children of God. And with that gift he also gave us a promise: our friendship with Christ. And friendship with Christ brings meaning and joy to our lives here on earth, until the day we enter into the true joy of heaven.
Try to explain this “joy” to people without faith and they will stare at you as if you were from Mars! People without God cannot grasp the idea of this joy. For them, joy is another word for hedonistic pleasures of the senses, and that would be everything that life is about. Back in the days, you would have seen those billboards along the roads and the highways extolling the virtue of legalized pot. My goodness, they tried to make us think that legalizing pot is the ultimate be-all-and-end-all solution to all the intractable and complex social problems! Getting high on pot, getting drunk on booze, indulging oneself with pornography and gambling - those who live only for the desires of the flesh shall never discover true joy. Instead they find emptiness, loneliness, anxiety, and despair in their desperate search for a way out of boredom and torpor.
But Christian joy is profoundly different because it comes from truth, from what-is, from reality. And that reality is the fact that God has made us for Himself. Think about this: the eternal God, who is all-sufficient unto Himself, who is happy unto Himself, this God has decided to share the joy of being, the joy of existing, with creatures He has made from nothingness for Himself! And not only made us, He has continued to sustain us, holding us up, guiding us, providing for us with everything that we need. And not just our physical needs and wants, He gives us reason and purpose and meaning so you and I can get up every morning and find life worth living. And that is why life could be full of joy even in the midst of struggles and defeats.
Of course, perfection is not yet here, and the full light of day only comes later. Some darkness still lingers, but we know we are on the right track when we follow Christ, who is with us to help us, and so we can still rejoice.
