Daily Offering · 15 December 2025 · Feria II after III Sunday of Advent
Daily Offering: December 15, 2025 | What Sayest Thou of Thyself
Bloom’s Daily Offering for Monday, and the Gospel this morning is a short interview in which the interesting question comes last—what sayest thou of thyself. This is the Feria II after the Third Sunday of Advent, third class, and the vestments are violet again.…
The order of this offering
Before the readings
The Word
Offering and Canon
I
Opening Address
Bloom’s Daily Offering for Monday, and the Gospel this morning is a short interview in which the interesting question comes last—what sayest thou of thyself. This is the Feria II after the Third Sunday of Advent, third class, and the vestments are violet again. Yesterday they were rose for one morning; today the rose is folded and put up on the shelf, and every word of yesterday’s Mass is said again underneath a different colour.
There is no saint on the calendar today, nothing displaced, and no commemoration in the Mass. There is a Monday in the third week of Advent and the whole of Sunday’s Mass handed over entire, which is how the ferias of this season work. So the question the Church puts in front of us is the one it put yesterday, and it is still: what sayest thou of thyself.
Yesterday was Gaudete, and we spent it on Paul telling a congregation to let your petitions be made known. This morning the same two readings come round again with the brightness taken off them, and I want to spend the hour on the Gospel rather than the Lesson, because the Gospel has a question in it that never got opened yesterday. A delegation is sent out to the Jordan with a list of possible answers already written down, and only when all of them have failed does anybody say: what sayest thou of thyself.
One thing before we begin. Nothing here is going to ask you to fit yourself into a category before you are allowed to be in the room. The Gospel does not manage it either, and that turns out to be the whole of the argument.
II
A Word on Today’s Propers
Today is a genuine repeat, and I would rather say so plainly than dress it up as something it is not.
The Mass of this feria is the Mass of the Third Sunday of Advent, entire. Introit, Collect, Lesson, Gradual, Gospel and Secret were all prayed yesterday morning in the Mass we called let your petitions be made known, and they are prayed again this morning without a word altered. That is the same pattern the second week of Advent ran on, when four Masses in a row carried one Sunday forward and the last of them asked us to abound in hope. It is a real feature of the 1962 calendar rather than a gap in it.
The Epistle is Philippians 4:4-7 and the Gospel is John 1:19-28, both read and printed in full yesterday. They are not reprinted here. The citations are given and linked, the Introit, Collect, Gradual and Secret are printed as the Mass prints them, and the homily is written fresh onto the half of the Gospel yesterday left alone. On Tuesday last week we sat with the question of what a text is the second time it reaches you, in written for our learning, and I am not going to make that argument twice. What sayest thou of thyself is a different question from have you heard this before.
Two things have changed overnight and both are subtractions. The rank has come down from first class to third, and there is no Alleluia. Yesterday the Gradual ran on into one; on a feria repeating the Sunday it does not, and the psalm verses stand by themselves.
Saturday’s Mass was a borrowed one too, in glory in the lord, and the same principle was at work there. A quieter Mass is not a smaller one, and it still asks: what sayest thou of thyself. The volume came down overnight and the question did not.
III
Introit
(Phil. 4:4-6; Ps. 84:2. The antiphon draws three verses of the Lesson into one sentence and shortens the third of them: where the verse reads by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, the entrance chant sings only by prayer.)
Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I say, rejoice. Let your modesty be known to all men: the Lord is nigh. Be nothing solicitous: but in every thing by prayer let your petitions be made known to God.
℣. Lord, thou hast blessed thy land: thou hast turned away the captivity of Jacob. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
That psalm verse has now opened five Masses in this archive, the first of them on the sixteenth of last month in thoughts of peace. It is a report of something already finished, in the past tense, sitting underneath an antiphon that is still asking for things.
IV
Collect
Lend Your ear to our prayers, we beseech You, O Lord, and brighten the darkness of our minds by the grace of Your coming. Who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.
Both verbs in that prayer belong to God. He is asked to listen, and he is asked to bring light into a dark place, and nothing in the sentence is conditional on the person praying it first producing an account of themselves.
V
Epistle
(Philippians 4:4-7, Douay-Rheims. Read in full yesterday and printed there; today the Mass repeats it and it is not reprinted. The full text stands in yesterday’s Mass, let your petitions be made known.)
The Lesson opens with the line everybody knows and then, three sentences later, tells a whole congregation to be nothing solicitous and to bring every thing they need. Nothing in those four verses asks a reader to establish first that they are the kind of person entitled to ask.
VI
Gradual
(Ps. 79:2-3, 2. The response joins the last clause of verse two to the last clause of verse three and does not sing what stands between them—shine forth before Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasses. Yesterday this section carried the Alleluia and its acclamations; on the feria they are omitted and the verses stand alone.)
Thou that sittest, O Lord, upon the cherubims: stir up thy might, and come.
℣. Give ear, O thou that rulest Israel: thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep.
℣. Stir up thy might, O Lord, and come to save us.
The petition is sung twice and answered neither time. That is what a season of waiting sounds like when the shouting has been taken out of it.
VII
Gospel
(John 1:19-28, Douay-Rheims. Read in full yesterday and printed there; today the Mass repeats it and it is not reprinted. The full text stands in let your petitions be made known.)
Priests and Levites are sent out from Jerusalem to establish who John is. They put three names to him and he refuses all three. Then they ask the open question—What sayest thou of thyself?—and he answers with a job rather than a title.
Everyone standing in that scene is Jewish, including John, including the men sent to question him, and including the one he says is already among them. It is an argument inside a family about who somebody is, and it has been preached for centuries as though it were an argument between two peoples. It is not, and this morning does not treat it as one.
The Offering
Daily Homily | What Sayest Thou of Thyself
Start with the shape of the interview, because the shape is the argument and it is very rarely read as an interview.
Start with the shape of the interview, because the shape is the argument and it is very rarely read as an interview.
A delegation walks out of the city to question him, and the question it carries is not an open one. They have three answers with them. Art thou the Christ. Art thou Elias. Art thou the prophet.
Three boxes, ruled in advance, and the whole exercise is to establish which of the three this man goes in. What sayest thou of thyself is nowhere on that sheet of paper when they set out.
So follow what happens to the boxes. He refuses the first, refuses the second, and answers the third with a single syllable. I am not the Christ. I am not. No.
Three straight negatives before one positive claim, and the men from Jerusalem have now used up everything they brought. Only then, with the prepared answers exhausted, does anybody in the passage think to say: what sayest thou of thyself.
That is the order, and the order is the whole thing. The open question is the last question. What sayest thou of thyself is not how the interview began. It is what was left when the categories ran out.
The list was written before the journey
Consider what it takes to set out on that errand with your conclusions already packed.
The delegation is not stupid and it is not acting in bad faith. It has a job, which is to find out what to make of a man drawing crowds into the desert, and it has done what any competent body does: it has narrowed the field in advance to a manageable number of options. That is ordinary administrative sense. It is also the precise reason the honest question comes last, because what sayest thou of thyself cannot be asked while there is still a box left unticked. A prepared answer and a real one cannot both be in the room.
And the first refusal is the expensive one. Art thou the Christ was, on the evidence in front of them, a live possibility, and taking it would have settled everything in his favour—the crowds, the standing, the deference of a delegation from the capital. He says no to it flatly, and the evangelist reports the refusal three times over in one sentence—he confessed, and did not deny, and he confessed—so that there is no wriggle room in it at all. What sayest thou of thyself gets a truthful answer from a man who has just turned down a much better one.
And there is something he does not do, which is argue with the sheet. He does not tell them their categories are inadequate or deliver a lecture on the poverty of their instrument. He answers the three questions actually asked, briefly and accurately, and then waits. What sayest thou of thyself arrives because he has been patient with a bad form and has not filled in a single box wrongly to be helpful.
The question is asked for a file
Now the clause everybody skips, because it tells you who the conversation is really for.
Who art thou, that we may give an answer to them that sent us? That is the sentence that carries what sayest thou of thyself into the passage, and the reason attached to it is not curiosity. They need something to report. There are men back in Jerusalem waiting for a line, and the interview is being conducted on their behalf by people who will not be in the room when the line is read out. What sayest thou of thyself is being asked by proxy.
I want to sit on that for a moment, because it changes the temperature of the question completely. What sayest thou of thyself asked by somebody who wants to know you is one thing. What sayest thou of thyself asked so that a third party who is not present can be given a satisfactory sentence about you is a different transaction wearing the same words. The grammar is identical. The purpose is not.
And John answers it anyway. That is worth saying, because the easy homily here is that he refused to be processed, and he did not. He gave them something true and portable, and he let them take it away and write it down. What sayest thou of thyself got a real answer even though the asking was on somebody else’s account.
An answer that is a job, not a title
Here is what he gives them, and it is not on any list ever drawn up.
I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. Not a rank. Not a lineage. A function, and a temporary one at that, because a voice exists only for as long as it is speaking and is gone the moment it stops. He describes himself as the least permanent thing in the passage. What sayest thou of thyself gets answered with a description of work rather than of status.
That answer is unfileable, and it is meant to be. You cannot put a voice in a box marked Christ, Elias or prophet. The delegation will have to go back and report a sentence rather than a category, which is a considerably worse day for them and a considerably more honest one for everybody else. What sayest thou of thyself, answered truthfully, very often produces exactly this problem.
A form that cannot hold the answer is not evidence against the answer. It is a report on the form.
And the man giving that answer is the one the Church has put at the middle of Advent. Not the man with the best title. The one who declined three of them, described himself as a sound, and pointed away from himself in the same breath. What sayest thou of thyself is answered, in the season’s own Gospel, by somebody with nothing to put on a form.
Not the argument from Tuesday
A clarification, because two Advent Masses have now stood on repeated readings and they are not making one claim.
On the ninth we asked what a text is when it comes round a second time, and whether needing something again is a report on the person needing it. We called that morning written for our learning and it turned on the word patience. That is a question about frequency, and what sayest thou of thyself is not asking it.
Today is a question about description. What sayest thou of thyself does not ask how often you have been here. It asks what you are supposed to say when somebody wants a serviceable sentence about you, and whether you owe them one that fits their sheet. A person can be entirely welcome to keep coming back and still be required, every time, to say which of three things they are.
Who this lands on
Here is the harm, and it does not come from the Gospel. It comes from what has been built on top of a thousand years of Christian charity, and ours is the record we are obliged to examine.
There is a very old idea in our own tradition that help ought to be preceded by an account. Before the bed, before the meal, before the coat, a person should be able to say who they are and how they came to be here, in terms the person handing over the coat finds satisfactory. We even gave the two halves of it names—the deserving and the undeserving—and we ran soup kitchens, night shelters, relief committees and charitable trusts on the distinction for centuries. What sayest thou of thyself became the price of admission.
I am naming who that lands on hardest, and it is people with nowhere to live. Not because today’s Gospel mentions them, but because they are the group most reliably required to narrate themselves to a stranger before anything is handed over, and to do it again to the next stranger, and the one after that. The story has to be coherent, consistent with the last time it was told, and told in the register the desk expects. What sayest thou of thyself is asked ten times before breakfast and it is never once asked out of interest.
Weigh that habit by what it grows, because the fruit test is the only honest instrument we have. It grows people who have learned the version of their own life that works on a Tuesday morning and give it fluently. It grows help that arrives fastest to whoever tells the tidiest story, which is not the same as whoever needs it most.
It grows a queue in which the articulate are served first. It grows staff who mean well and ask what sayest thou of thyself because the paperwork will not move without it. And it grows the quiet, ordinary, well-meant assumption that a person who cannot produce a satisfactory answer to what sayest thou of thyself has something to hide.
Set the Gospel against that and the habit does not survive contact. The one man in this passage who is asked to account for himself gives an answer that would fail every assessment ever written, and the season is built on him. On the seventh we sat with a Lesson from Romans and asked who is entitled to hold a verdict on somebody else, and called it receive one another. That was about judgment after the fact. This is earlier and narrower: what sayest thou of thyself is about the sentence a person is made to produce before any judgment has been reached at all.
The far lane at eight in the morning
There is a story sometimes told of two brothers and a municipal swimming pool, and the whole of it happens without what sayest thou of thyself ever being put to either of them.
The younger one had been caring for the elder for a long time by then, and had worked out that the eight o’clock session on a Saturday was the only hour in the week the place was quiet enough to be worth the drive. He brought him every Saturday. Somewhere in the first month the staff started roping off the far lane before they arrived and running the water a degree warmer for that hour, and the two of them found it already done every week after that.
The desk never asked what the elder brother’s difficulty was, and what sayest thou of thyself was not put to the younger one either. He tried to explain it once, at the counter, and got about four words in before the woman on duty told him the water was ready and handed him the locker key. That was the extent of the conversation, and it was the same the following week, and for years afterwards.
I am not going to tell you it became something. The brothers stopped coming eventually, for reasons the story does not supply, and the lane rope stayed out on Saturdays for a while after that because the instruction to take it in was never given. The younger brother never learned which member of staff had started it. What sayest thou of thyself was never asked, so it was also never answered, and there is no moment in this story where anybody is thanked.
What there is, is a rope and a thermostat, arranged by people who treated the account as something they could do without. They did not need the sentence. They needed the hour to be usable, and they made it usable, and what sayest thou of thyself stayed in the drawer where it belonged.
The colour goes back on
A word about the day itself, because the calendar makes the same point in cloth.
Yesterday the rose was permitted and this morning it is folded away, and the difference between the two Masses is a colour, a rank, and a missing Alleluia. Not one syllable of the Lesson has moved. Not one word of the Gospel is different. What sayest thou of thyself was asked in rose vestments on Sunday and is asked in violet on Monday, and it carries exactly the weight it carried yesterday.
That is a liturgy which refuses to let its content depend on its occasion. The bright morning does not make the text truer and the ordinary Monday does not make it less so. The Church says the identical thing at a lower volume and expects it to hold, which is exactly what it asks of anybody carrying something into a week where nothing is special about the day.
Where this leaves us
So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this.
You do not owe anybody a version of yourself that fits their three boxes. If the honest answer to what sayest thou of thyself is a job you are doing, or a stretch you are getting through, or a sentence that will not go in any of the available categories, that is a better answer than a tidy one, and the man the whole season is built around gave exactly that kind and was not corrected for it.
And take the other half, which is the part you can act on today. You are going to be on the asking side of this before the week is out. Somebody will be standing in front of you unable to produce a satisfactory account of themselves, and you will have three perfectly reasonable boxes in your head. Skip the question. Rope off the lane and warm the water, and let what sayest thou of thyself stay unasked, because most of the time you did not need the answer for anything except your own comfort.
The Collect this morning asks God to lend an ear and to bring light. Neither of those is conditional on a good account being given first. Put the theology aside if it is not yours and the sentence still stands: it is possible to help somebody before you have worked out what they are, and what sayest thou of thyself is a question far more often asked for the asker’s benefit than for the answerer’s.
↑ The order resumes below.
IX
Secret
We beseech You, O Lord, that the gift we dedicate to You may be offered continually: that it may both carry out what You have ordained in this sacred mystery, and wonderfully work Your salvation within us. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.
X
The Holding
May God, who lends His ear before anybody has explained themselves, brighten whatever is dark in your thinking this week; may He ask nothing of you at the door that you cannot truthfully say; and when somebody puts what sayest thou of thyself to you in a room where the answer is going into a file, may you find you can give a true one and let them take it away.
And if none of that is yours to pray this morning, take it plainly. A person who cannot produce a tidy account of their own life is not concealing anything, and help that waits for a satisfactory sentence is help arranged for the convenience of the people giving it. Skip the question where you can. Warm the water.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Go, and ask one fewer question than you meant to.
XI
Frequently Asked Questions
Because on the ferias of Advent the Mass of the preceding Sunday is repeated, so this Monday carries the Third Sunday of Advent forward entire. Yesterday’s Mass prints both readings in full at let your petitions be made known, and the same pattern ran through the second week of Advent, most recently at abound in hope. It is a real feature of the 1962 calendar rather than an omission in it.
Because the Alleluia and its acclamations belong to the Sunday and are not said when a feria repeats that Mass. The psalm verses remain and the shout around them is dropped. This is a rule about ferial repetition rather than about Advent itself—a feast falling inside Advent keeps its own Alleluia, as one did on the eleventh at feed my sheep.
Because rose is permitted on Gaudete only, one morning in the year alongside its counterpart in Lent, and the season resumes its violet immediately afterwards. The lightening was real and it was also brief. Nothing in the text of the Mass changes with the colour.
No. Only seven vigils survived Pope Pius XII’s 1955 reform and the fifteenth of December is not among them, nor is the sixteenth, so nothing real is being passed over and nothing suppressed is being treated as real. Only three octaves survived—Christmas, Easter and Pentecost—and none of them reaches Advent. The feast of the eighth, kept as the glory of Jerusalem, has no octave in the 1962 Missal either.
Because the first two Sundays of Advent both open their Collect with the same Latin verb, Excita, and this one does not. This week’s begins by asking God to lend an ear and to lighten the darkness of our minds, and the Excita petition has moved out of the Collect and into the Gradual, which sings it twice. The chain runs back through receive one another to put on the armour of light.
No. Strip the theology out and the claim still stands: help that arrives only after a satisfactory account has been given is sorted by fluency rather than by need, and what sayest thou of thyself is very often asked so that somebody else can be handed a line. Anybody who has had to explain themselves twice at the same desk already knows the shape of it. Bloom’s whole thesis fits in three words—truth, love, acceptance—and belief was never the entry fee.
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Epistle and Gospel text: Douay-Rheims Bible, Bishop Challoner revision—the standard English scripture translation used across traditional hand missals. Introit, Collect, Gradual, and Secret: the Missale Romanum (1962), the Third Sunday of Advent, carried forward to the Monday feria, following The New Marian Missal for Daily Mass by Sylvester P. Juergens, S.M., S.T.D. (Regina Press, Imprimatur 1961).
Faith in Bloom, under the Church of Bloom, is a ministry of Bloom Ministries, a nonprofit organization tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. It is offered in the Independent Catholic tradition and is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.
