3 Sunday Advent, 16 December 2012, Luke 3:10-18

A few years ago, sitting over lunch a classmate of mine was talking about how he would help out on his family farm over the holidays. For whatever reason, he got around to explaining the whole process of dairy farming to us. Needless to say, many of us, coming from the countryside had a reasonable idea what he was on about. A friend of mine from Dublin, listening to the conversation churped up: "Don't be silly, sure we all know that milk comes from the supermarket. Milk from a cow! You must take us for idiots altogether!"

Now, we all knew that this friend of mine was kidding around. We all know that milk does, in fact, come from cows.

Many of the images that we have from the gospels are agricultural images – and at that they are images from a time when agricultural technology was much more primitive than it is now. The image from this Sunday's gospel of a winnowing fan is a great example of this. A winnowing fan is a small, hand held basket. The winnower uses the fan to throw the grain in the air. By moving the grain in this way, the heavier grain falls more or less straight down, while the chaff, a much finer and lighter substance is carried away to the side. And so, you are left with clean grain, ready to mill into flour.

A Winnowing Fan

We never see winnowing happen today because most of us do not live on the land. We find our grain, i.e. our bread, on the baker's shelf, or indeed like my friend said – on the supermarket shelf. It requires imagination and knowledge for us to understand the image that the gospel is presenting us with today.

The most interesting part of the image from the gospel is that the chaff is part of the grain. Eventually it becomes a waste product, but before that it serves a very useful purpose in being part of the grain.

That is just like us as human beings. Often all we can see is the chaff – we cannot see our own greatness, or worse we cannot see the greatness in others. All we can see is waste. We forget that, when the time is right, we will be 'winnowed'. That means that we are disturbed, thrown up in the air, as it were, so that the separating and purifying breath of God's Holy Spirit would purify us of the chaff that was necessary for us to grow into the fullness of life.

This Sunday is Gaudete Sunday. It is one of only two Sundays in the Church's year when rose coloured vestments can be used. Today is the Sunday that the rose coloured candle is lit on the Advent wreath. Gaudete is a latin word that means: 'Rejoice'. And for us, our reason for rejoicing is the Lord, for it is the Lord who reveals us as worthy grain, ready to be milled into the flour of the bread of the Eucharist – which is to be Christ in the world. We become what we receive.

From the entrance antiphon for today's Mass, taken from St Paul's letter to the Philippians: "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice!"