This weekend, we celebrate the Third Sunday of Advent, known as Gaudete Sunday, from a Latin word meaning “to rejoice.” The priest’s optional change from violet to rose-colored vestments signifies a subdued joy as we continue our Advent longing for the coming of the Lord. During Advent, we focus our attention, as St. Bernard explains, on three comings of Our Lord: His first coming in the Incarnation as He took on our flesh and was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, His Second Coming as our judge and king at the end of time, and His daily coming into our lives through grace. But the further we get into the Advent season, the more we focus on that first coming of Christ in the Incarnation.

Why did Jesus become man? After all, being God Himself, He is perfect in Himself and has no need of us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us four reasons for Christ’s coming in the Incarnation: (1) Jesus came to save us from our sins in order to reconcile us with God; (2) Jesus came to be our model for holiness, in other words, to show us how to be set apart for God; (3) Jesus came to show us the depths of God’s love; and (4) Jesus came to make us partakers in His divine nature (CCC 457-460).

When Jesus chose to become one of us, He did not take on our flesh because of how great or how perfect we are. Rather, He came “to seek and to save what was lost” (Luke 19:10b). Because the human race had become lost by turning away from God through sin, only the God-man Himself could bridge the gap between the human and the divine. Thus, in an ultimate act of love, our God descended to take on the flesh of His creatures in order to die and rise to save us, to reveal His love, and to unite us to Himself. Receiving the gift of His presence among us is the purpose of the time of preparation that is the season of Advent.

When Jesus was on earth, as a priest explained in a homily I recently heard, it was not those who “had it all together” to whom He was attracted; rather, Christ was drawn to the weak, the vulnerable, the sinners — those who were aware of their own inadequacies and “nothingness.” The prophets in the Old Testament spoke also about this love of God for the weak. God tells His People through the prophet Jeremiah, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have had pity on your nothingness” (Jeremiah 31:3). And just as God the Father loved His Chosen People and had pity on their weakness and nothingness, so Jesus Christ, the Son of God, so loved us and was so drawn to us in our weakness that He chose to take that weakness unto Himself by becoming man, like us in all things except sin.

On a daily, practical level, this means for us that we do not have to have everything figured out or have ourselves perfectly put together in order to be able to approach God. While God is infinitely greater than we, He has chosen to make Himself approachable and vulnerable out of His great desire to be in intimate relationship with us. He comes to us in our weakness, in our nothingness. In those moments when we feel most imperfect and inadequate, He desires to come to us, to enter intimately into our lives, and to be Himself our perfection. Thus, to be in relationship with the infinite God, I must humbly allow Him to love me now as I am and respond to His grace to let Him be the one bringing about the conversion and transformation in my life. And in this being loved and responding in love, I will find true joy. May we enter into the joy of this Gaudete Sunday and this entire Advent and Christmas season by allowing ourselves to be loved by our Incarnate God in the midst of our weakness.

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Sr. Mary Martha Becnel is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.