The Third Light: The Serious Business of Joy
There is something magnificently defiant about the third candle of Advent. Known as the "Gaudete" candle and traditionally rose-colored rather than purple, it stands among its more solemn brothers like a jester at a funeral or a butterfly in a library. The Church, in what appears to be either divine audacity or divine mischief, interrupts her own season of preparation and waiting to declare, of all things, joy.
This seems, to our modern minds, rather like interrupting a tragic play for a comedy routine, or pausing during a fast to have a feast. Yet in this apparent contradiction we stumble upon a truth so fundamental that we have almost entirely forgotten it: joy is not the opposite of seriousness but the very proof of it. A man is never more serious than when he is genuinely joyful, just as a child is never more grave than when he is truly playing.
The modern world (which has somehow managed to make even pleasure a very gloomy business) assumes that joy is a kind of lightness, a lifting of weight, a casting off of burden. But the joy of Advent is quite different. It is not the joy of weight lifted but of weight transformed, like a dancer who does not defy gravity but uses it, or a bird that does not escape the air but rides upon it.
Consider Mary's Magnificat, that great song of Advent joy. She does not sing because her circumstances have become easier - indeed, they have become impossibly difficult. She does not rejoice because her burdens have been lifted, but because they have become glorious burdens. She is not lighthearted in the sense of having no weight to carry; she carries within her the weight of God himself. Her joy is not despite this weight but because of it.
And here we discover the stunning secret of Christian joy, which sets it apart from mere happiness or pleasure. It is not a joy that comes when things go right, but a joy that makes things right. It is not the joy of escape but the joy of engagement, not the joy of retreat but the joy of advance. It is, in fact, the only joy robust enough to look straight at sorrow and still rejoice.
This explains the rather startling fact that the saints who were most serious about joy were also the most serious about suffering. St. Francis, who called himself God's jester and spoke of perfect joy, bore the wounds of Christ. Mother Teresa, who insisted on joy as a duty, spent her life among the dying. They understood what we have forgotten - that real joy is not the absence of sorrow but the conquest of it, not the denial of darkness but the defiance of it.
This is why the third candle of Advent is rose-colored, like the sky just before dawn. It does not pretend the darkness isn't there; it promises that the darkness will not have the final word. It is the color of hope fulfilled just enough to justify all hoping, of victory guaranteed but not yet fully won. It is, in short, the color of Christian joy, which is neither optimism nor denial but a deep and daring gladness that comes from knowing how the story ends.
The placement of this joy-candle, coming just past the halfway point of Advent, is itself a small sermon. We light it not because the waiting is over, but because we have waited long enough to remember what we're waiting for. Like children who wake early on Christmas morning, our joy comes not from having what we desire, but from knowing with unshakeable certainty that it is coming.
And perhaps this is why the Church, in her ancient wisdom, makes this Sunday rose-colored instead of simply golden or white. Joy, in this fallen world, always comes tinged with red, like the first light of dawn or the last light of sunset. It is the color of battlefield victory, of difficult birth, of love proved through suffering. It is, in other words, the color of incarnation - of divinity wrapped in flesh, of infinity contained in infancy, of God himself becoming vulnerable to pain so that our pain might become a path to joy.
As we light this third candle, we are not practicing mere optimism or indulging in temporary gladness. We are engaging in something far more radical - the assertion that joy is not merely an emotion but a cosmic reality, not just a feeling but a fact. We are declaring that the universe is not a tragic story with comic moments, but a comic story with tragic moments, a great drama that ends not in disaster but in delight.
And if that seems foolish - well, perhaps it is. But it is the foolishness of children who laugh at funerals because they know something about resurrection, the foolishness of martyrs who sang hymns at their execution because they knew something about victory. It is, in short, the foolishness of Christmas itself, which dares to claim that infinite joy can be contained in a finite manger, and that God himself might arrive as a baby's laugh in the night.
