The Third Sunday of Advent: December 14, 2025
This painting is located in the Chapel of St. Boniface.
“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear, and the poor have good news brought to them.” - Matthew 11:4–5 (NRSVue)
John the Baptist is in prison. He has heard that Jesus, his cousin whom he has baptized, is doing amazing things, like healing the sick on the sabbath and holding the Pharisees to account for their hypocrisy.
What does the future hold? Will the prophecy of the coming Messiah be fulfilled, and by whom? He gets word to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come?”
Jesus answers, not with certainty, but with signs of joy: the blind see, the lame walk, the poor hear good news. Joy, then, becomes a kind of defiance — a refusal to let despair have the final word.
Mary, mother of Jesus, was the embodiment of resistant joy. In a world that offered her neither power nor safety, she sang a song of reversal: the mighty cast down, the humble lifted high. Her joy was not naïve, but prophetic — born from faith that God’s mercy was already at work, foreseeing that the world was about to change forever.
This Advent, we wait as John waited, as Mary waited — with hearts stretched between doubt and hope. Our world right now is in turmoil. As we keep the candle burning, waiting for dawn, our joy is in the waiting. That is our resistance.
The birth of the baby Jesus is nigh.
Canon Stephen Nicholas, MD
Canon for Mission