Saturday in the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 9, 2022

Isaiah 6, 1-8

In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, with the train of his garment filling the Temple. Seraphim were stationed above; each of them had six wings: with two they veiled their faces, with two they veiled their feet, and with two they hovered aloft.  They cried one to the other, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts! All the earth is filled with his glory!” At the sound of that cry, the frame of the door shook and the house was filled with smoke.  Then I said, “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding an ember that he had taken with tongs from the altar.  He touched my mouth with it and said, “See, now that this has touched your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.”  Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” “Here I am,” I said; “send me!”

The Lord God Almighty appears as himself very seldom in the Holy Scriptures.  Many times, especially in Genesis and Exodus, he speaks directly to Moses.  He also speaks to and through the Prophets.  We hear his voice in the Gospels commending his Son and commanding us to listen to him.  Perhaps he appears openly three times in the Old Testament: walking in the Garden of Eden and confronting Adam and Eve concerning their sin (Genesis 3, 8), appearing to Moses (Exodus 34, 5-6), and then his appearance here; and again in the course of the visions in the Book of Revelation (cf. Revelation 4, 2-3).  The Lord God is not described in any of these appearances.  In fact, the lack of a description of God is the most conspicuous element in these accounts.  Certainly, we would say to the authors of these books, “Show us the Father and it will be enough for us!” (John 14, 8).  But we ought to know that “no one man shall see God and live” (Exodus 33, 20).   That is, those who were granted visions of him saw him indirectly: they knew it was God because he was wrapped in dazzling light.  As St. Paul says, the Son is “the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6, 15-16).

Isaiah knew God in his vision through the sheer majesty of what he could see of the One seated on the high and lofty throne in the Temple, and whom the seraphim praised with their magnificent hymn, which we join at the end of the Eucharistic Preface at Holy Mass.  And though Isaiah could see God in but “in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13, 12), he feared for his life: “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips!”  As a man of unclean lips, he would be severely disabled from speaking at all of what he had seen and heard in his vision in the Temple.  He would be in the terrible position of Zechariah after the Angel Gabriel struck him deaf and dumb: “And when he came out, he could not speak to them, and they perceived that he had seen a vision in the Temple.  And he made signs to them and remained dumb” (Luke 1, 22).  Why did he consider himself a man “of unclean lips”?  Because he has of a people whose lips had been rendered unclean through their sins.  Strictly speaking, we might think of the lips as becoming unclean through eating some unclean food.  And the food might have become unclean because it had been sacrificed to idols.  Indeed, when Isaiah’s lips were cleansed by an angel using a coal from the altar, God told him to speak harshly to the people until their cities were destroyed, signifying the Almighty’s anger at their sin.

Isaiah’s confession of uncleanness suffices for the angel to purify his lips — a sign of God’s forgiveness.  The subsequent call, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”, brings Isaiah to answer, “Here I am!  Send me!”  His newly forgiven state allows him to see himself as the servant of the Lord, and he is eager to work in the Lord’s service.  This brings to mind how Peter, Andrew, James, and John left everything at once to follow Jesus at his call, and also the tax collector Matthew, whom one might think very unlikely to do so.  These believe whole-heartedly in God’s call and his providing for those who answered his call.  As the Lord Jesus says in today’s Gospel Reading (Matthew 10, 24-33): “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”  

In answering God’s call, whether to perform a single simple action or to make a life-changing decision, he goes with us, grants us the grace and ability to accomplish it, and protects us so that we may receive the faithful servant’s reward in heaven.