THE DESERT BRINGS FORTH JONQUILS

 

THE DESERT BRINGS FORTH JONQUILS

With heightened emotion, people across the world are watching the triumphs and disappointments of the World Cup. The camera gives us the thrill and skill of the players, the tight concentration of the managers and officials and the ‘agony and ecstasy’ of the supporters. The game, as it is often said, brings the world together. Differences of wealth and culture, belief and custom, fade as people engage on equal terms on ‘a level playing field’. The mighty tumble and the weak lift their heads. At the time of writing it is even said Morocco could win the cup!

The ’beautiful game’ gives us news that can lift or deflate us in an instant. The scriptures, in contrast, gives us news that may take months, years or even millennia to come true. ‘Happy Christmas!’ is a greeting that means different things depending on who says it and who receives it. You can give the greeting to a person poor, sick or in prison and mean it. It is not an insult. Your greeting carries hope – not in the immediate future but in a time which will definitely come – if giver and receiver want it.

The third Sunday of Advent is known to some of us as Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin word for joy. The readings are full of impossible wishes, ‘Let the wilderness exult and the wasteland rejoice. Let them bring forth flowers like the jonquil.’ This yellow flower grows in fragrant clusters, the last thing you would expect in a desert.

The message is clear. There are no instant solutions to our broken world. Just look at the present politics of Zimbabwe! But there is hope, not a wishy-washy hope that is just words but a real deep-down hope, buried in the wasteland of our dreams. The jonquil, or whatever beautiful flower we come across in unlikely places, is a sign. Jesus gave us signs: a deaf man hears, a blind one sees, a woman bent double for years straightens up. The gospel is littered with jonquils. But we have to want to be healed and do something about it.

Peter Prestage was a Jesuit priest who walked to Zimbabwe in 1882 and died, still walking, twenty-five years later near Masvingo. He spent years trying to persuade King Lobengula to give permission for him to teach and preach. He met disappointment after disappointment. But he just kept going. ‘What was great about him was his working and hoping for so long ‘without hope’ and finding in the end that his hope had not been in vain.’ (Francis Rea, The Shield, 1966).   

11 December 2022      Advent Sunday 3A       Is 35:1…10      Jam 5:7-10       Mt 11:2-11