Saturday in the First Week of Advent, December 3, 2022

Isaiah 30, 19-21; 23-26

Thus says the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: O people of Zion, who dwell in Jerusalem, no more will you weep; He will be gracious to you when you cry out, as soon as he hears he will answer you. The Lord will give you the bread you need and the water for which you thirst. No longer will your Teacher hide himself, but with your own eyes you shall see your Teacher, While from behind, a voice shall sound in your ears: “This is the way; walk in it,” when you would turn to the right or to the left. [And you shall defile the plates of your graven things of silver, and the garment of your molten things of gold, and shall cast them away as the uncleanness of a menstruous woman. You shall say to it: Get out of here.] He will give rain for the seed that you sow in the ground, And the wheat that the soil produces will be rich and abundant. On that day your flock will be given pasture and the lamb will graze in spacious meadows; The oxen and the asses that till the ground will eat silage tossed to them with shovel and pitchfork. Upon every high mountain and lofty hill there will be streams of running water. On the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall, The light of the moon will be like that of the sun and the light of the sun will be seven times greater like the light of seven days. On the day the Lord binds up the wounds of his people, he will heal the bruises left by his blows.

The lectionary text for the First Reading of today’s Mass leaves out a verse of the passage, verse 22.  I have included it here within brackets.  Isaiah’s prophecy describes in allegorical terms the work the Lord would do when he came to the earth.  Specifically, Isaiah here is speaking to a conquered people whose capital city has been burned and devastated and whose Temple — the only Temple of God in Israel — has been destroyed.  The situation applies just as much to the Jews at the time the Son of God became incarnate.  The Jews were a conquered, occupied nation whose Temple was often defiled by the Romans.  Their own leaders were corrupt and held their positions through bribing the occupying power.  The people who had taken it upon themselves to interpret the Scriptures for them only interpreted them in such a way as to benefit themselves.  This dreadful condition has befallen the Jews because of their disobedience to the Law given them by God through Moses.  Isaiah, long before this time, speaks of its sudden end with the coming of their God among them: “No more will you weep; He will be gracious to you when you cry out, as soon as he hears he will answer you.”  We are reminded of how Gabriel said to the Virgin Mary, “Do not fear”, and how the Lord himself said to the widow of Naim, “Do not weep” (Luke 7, 13) just before he raised up her son.  After rising from the dead he said to the broken-hearted Mary Magdalene, “Why are you weeping?”, as though to say, “Do not weep.”  He says this to us as well, for our current state in this world is not so different from that of Israel at the time of the Babylonians and the Romans, and even from that of Mary Magdalene, whose, “They have taken my Lord away and I do not know where they laid him” well summarizes the position of the Christian believer living within an anti Christian secular society.  But we are told not to weep, for the Lord will come and answer our prayers the moment we have said them, and this was fulfilled in the miracles performed by the Lord Jesus in his time on earth.  Even today he answers prayers this way though we are slow to see it.  Most importantly, he forgives us our sins in an instant and allows us to experience this with our senses when we confess them to a priest.  This follows for the other sacraments as well, most especially when Jesus, acting through the priest, turns bread and wine into his Body and Blood.

“No longer will your Teacher hide himself, but with your own eyes you shall see your Teacher.”  The Lord God walked among us and taught, and even answered the questions of those who heard him.  He established his Church on the Apostles to teach us after he ascended into heaven.  His continuous teaching presence has existed here for two thousand years.  Not even the Jews had such a benefit, for prophets appeared among them only sporadically and often were not recognized as such during their lifetimes.

“And you shall defile the plates of your graven things of silver, and the garment of your molten things of gold, and shall cast them away, etc.”. This verse, excised from the reading, is an important one because in it we learn of how this time, with the coming of the Lord himself to the earth, we will reject our former idolatry, to which we are much attached.  We will throw off the chains of materialist thinking, and cut away the tentacles of our devotion to worldly pleasures.  And this freedom, more than anything else, will mark a person as a Christian.

“On the day the Lord binds up the wounds of his people, he will heal the bruises left by his blows.”  The Hebrew word we translate as “day” could mean a very broad period of time, just “generation” often meant periods of hundreds of years, something more like “epoch”.  We live in this day of the Lord now.  He has come, and remains through the Church, through the Gospels, and through the sacraments, especially that of the altar.  In this time he reigns in the hearts of believers and we see the promises made long ago to the Jews, the rain, the rich soil, the abundant harvests, as the promise of eternal life with him in heaven.