Today we celebrate Laetare Sunday. It gets its name from the very first words the Church gives us for today’s Mass, in the Entrance Antiphon/Introit: “Rejoice, O Jerusalem!” from the book of Isaiah. In the middle of Lent, after several weeks of doing our best to have a penitential mindset, because every person on this earth needs to turn more fully to God, we break it up a little. We wear rose vestments, the readings are lighter in tone, and there is joy–a restrained joy, because it is still Lent, after all–in the liturgy of the Church.
Why do we do this? After all, there are only three more weeks until Easter. Why not just keep pushing through Lent? I know many people who suspect that we take a little breather here because the end of Lent is soon and because the old fasting and abstinence rules were so much more challenging. The actual reason for this Sunday of rejoicing, though, is not really to celebrate what we’ve done and what we’ve gone through. It is to celebrate the good work God has already done in us.
This truth is hard to recognize, because we often don’t see the work God is doing in us or in others. God does not see as we do. We hear from Samuel that “not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.” (1 Sam 16:7) Our Savior demonstrates this when he heals the man who was born blind. Christ makes clay with his spit, anoints the man’s eyes, and sends him to wash in the pool of Siloam. He went and washed and was able to see. The blind man followed the instructions of Christ–of God–and received his sight. In his defense of Christ, he shows that he not only sees clearly with his eyes, but also his heart. Contrast that to the pharisees. From all human appearances, the scholars of the law should see clearly the teachings of the Lord, they should be obedient to them, and their hearts should see the work of God. But these men who claimed to see were more blind than the man born blind ever was! They failed to recognize God’s work in front of their faces.
The blind man received something real from our Lord on that day. He allowed God to heal him, and not only was his sight healed, but his soul was restored too. He participated in the life of God. This is what happens for each of us at our baptism. Before we were baptized, we could not share fully in the life of God. We could not see him clearly. But when we were washed in the water of Baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we were healed like the blind man at Siloam. All sin was removed from our soul, we were infused with grace–remember, this is the gift that allows us to participate in God’s life–and virtue, we were reborn as members of God’s family, and we are marked with what the Church calls a “sacramental seal.” St. Thomas Aquinas helps us to understand that this means we are given a new and permanent quality in our soul that allows us to participate in worshiping God in a new way. This new life is strengthened in the sacrament of confirmation, which deepens the gift of the Holy Spirit within us, strengthens us, and sets us apart with another new quality for our soul: the courage, conviction, and call to bear witness to God through everything we do.
God doesn’t just give us these gifts and leave us to our own devices. Every time Christ encounters a hungry crowd in the Gospels, he does not leave them hungry. He sees the need and actually feeds them. This points us to the sacrament that strengthens our baptism and our confirmation: the Eucharist. Baptism cleanses us, confirmation strengthens us, and the Eucharist sustains us. All of these sacraments seem to work through symbols: water and words for baptism, chrism and words for confirmation, and bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. But to call them symbols underestimates them. A symbol points to something; it represents an idea. The sacraments are what we call “signs.” Not in the “one way” or “speed limit” sense, of course. This kind of sign makes something happen. It makes it real. The water and words in baptism are what we see, but what God makes us a part of his life. The chrism and words are what we see in confirmation, but God is pouring the Holy Spirit more deeply into our hearts. We see bread and wine, but God unites himself to us and to his Mystical Body in the Eucharist. A symbol doesn’t have that power. Priests wear black as a symbol to remind themselves that we are dust and we will one day return to dust. My clerical clothing doesn’t make me turn into dust. But receiving the Eucharist does unite me to God and his Church. That’s the difference.
This all points us to the true joy we remember of Laetare Sunday: God has entered into the world, and he has shared his life with each of us. He has shown us how to participate in that life. He has left us the gift of the sacraments not to symbolize his closeness to us, but to actually bring himself closer to us.
Let us strive to be like the man born blind in the Gospel and to ask God to open our eyes to him and to his work in our lives. We may not see it clearly yet, but today we rejoice in the good work God already has begun within us.