Lux in Tenebris: Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

He withdrew to Galilee.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Last week I suggested to you that holiness is about finding in our hearts the capacity to delight in fulfilling the law of Our Lord and His Church. In other words, holiness is about delight!

As I preached about delight and holiness, I could not, like many of you surely, but help think of Stª Teresa da Avila, the sixteenth century Spanish mystic who has left us great resources with which to understand the progress of the spiritual life.

Delights, form part of the vocabulary of Stª Teresa’s description of the spiritual life. According to Stª Teresa, spiritual delights are movements of God’s grace. These delights come to those who seek Him in His time and His plan. Spiritual delights bring a peace and stillness to the soul that fulfills and expands our hearts.  They can even come in the busiest and noisiest of circumstances.  For a moment, even as we might be busy about other things and thoughts, we are brought to a different level of awareness. And these spiritual delights are not felt purely at the level of the spirit, but in fact, are experienced viscerally as well.

But, as satisfying as they may be, Teresa does not recommend that we remain with this experience of delights. She instead asks us to persevere for more. In this path of spiritual progress, we encounter what St. John of the Cross, another Carmelite, and a collaborator of Stª Teresa, has famously presented as being the dark night of the soul. These are the moments when it appears that God has withdrawn from us. He appears to not be present, there is no sign of either consolation, or delights. And yet, Teresa maintains, we must persevere in our love of Him, and our spiritual exercises, go about our ordinary life, avoid offending God, and practice loving others.

When the time is right, we are told, God will reveal how great a light the “dark night” really was – like staring at the sun, so bright, that we can only see darkness. In this context, the words from the first reading today can be read somewhat differently from the usual:

Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness:
for there is no gloom where but now there was distress.
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone.
You have brought them abundant joy
and great rejoicing,
as they rejoice before you as at the harvest,
as people make merry when dividing spoils.

The anonymous Christian author of the incomplete work on Mathew draws on common sense to point out that the recollection of past troubles not only does not harm us but gives even greater delight. As long as our troubles are present, they seem to be oppressive, but when they are a thing of the past, the memory of them, he says, is a cause for our delight.

We must take these words to heart my dear brothers and sisters for those times when we believe that Our Lord has withdrawn His favour and His face from us. We know (intellectually) that He never in fact does so. In the light of the teaching of Stª Teresa, we know that He is preparing us for greater things, causing our faith to increase, primarily because at this point we progress on faith alone since our regular prayers seem to be of no use. When the trial is over, however, we will see how this experience opened our hearts to a greater, and different, experience of prayer.

As the first reading today teaches us:

First the Lord degraded …
but in the end he has glorified

All of these, we must bear in mind, is because like He called the first disciples, He has called us. He has called us by name, and He has taken us in His hand. He will not abandon us, but rather, is on the journey with us, so that He may cure us and take us to live with Him for all eternity. As the acclamation of the Gospel teaches us today:

Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the kingdom
and cured every disease among the people.

The path of the Christian is necessarily littered with trial and tribulation, because this is the way of the Cross. It is the only way to participate in the salvific action of Christ. When we suffer, we suffer with Christ, so that we may share in His glory, and, as St. Paul tells us today;

so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning.

Our Lord suffered the experience of abandonment on the Cross, but trusted in His father and through this trust entered into the glory of the resurrection. Similarly, it is when it appears that Our Lord withdraws from us that we are being taught the meaning of the Cross. Let us pray, therefore, for the grace to persevere when we believe that He has withdrawn His grace from us and know that we walk not in darkness, but in light.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria on 24 Jan 2026.)

(Image reference: Christ walking on the waters, Virgilio Mattoni, late 19^th cent., Private Collection.)