Wednesday in the Third Week of Advent, December 14, 2022

Isaiah 45, 6-8; 18; 21-25

I am the Lord, there is no other; I form the light, and create the darkness, I make well-being and create woe; I, the Lord, do all these things. Let justice descend, O heavens, like dew from above, like gentle rain let the skies drop it down. Let the earth open and salvation bud forth; let justice also spring up! I, the Lord, have created this. For thus says the Lord, the Creator of the heavens, who is God, the Designer and Maker of the earth who established it, Not creating it to be a waste, but designing it be lived in: I am the Lord, and there is no other. Who announced this from the beginning and foretold it from of old? Was it not I, the Lord, besides whom there is no other God? There is no just and saving God but me. Turn to me and be safe, all you ends of the earth, for I am God; there is no other! By myself I swear, uttering my just decree and my unalterable word: To me every knee shall bend; by me every tongue shall swear, Saying, “Only in the Lord are just deeds and power. Before him in shame shall come all who vent their anger against him. In the Lord shall be the vindication and the glory of all the descendants of Israel.”

“I am the Lord, there is no other.”  As the Lord gave the precepts of the Law to Moses, he frequently added, almost as a refrain, “I alone am the Lord.”  This may seem obvious to us, but it was not so for the vast majority of people living in the Ancient Near East, who worshipped a number of gods as a matter of course.  The very workings of the universe, for them, were signs of the interactions their gods had with one another.  The Lord God, however, taught his Chosen People, over and over, that he was the one and only God and that he would tolerate them worshipping “gods” made by human hands.  In passages in Exodus, we see the Lord explaining this by saying that he is a “jealous” God.  When we think of the word “jealousy” we think of a destructive, bitter, emotion.  God’s use of this term shows him as a heavenly groom who loves his wife passionately and does not want her to share her love with anyone else.  This would amount to a betrayal.  Such a disaster would not affect God but would lead to the soul’s loss of him.  “I form the light, and create the darkness, I make well-being and create woe; I, the Lord, do all these things.”  The Lord describes himself in terms of what he does for us, which hardly even begins to tell us who he really is.

“Let justice descend, O heavens, like dew from above, like gentle rain let the skies drop it down. Let the earth open and salvation bud forth; let justice also spring up!”  This beautiful passage, known in Latin as the Rorate Caeli, has been used by the Church for centuries as the opening verse to the Mass for the First Sunday in Advent.  In it, the Incarnation and Birth of the Son of God is likened to dew descending from heaven upon the thirsty earth.  He comes among us softly, gently, hardly even to be noticed.  He did this two thousand years ago and he comes among us with the same gentleness ar the consecration during the Sacrifice of the Mass.  His coming then is so quiet that a server rings a bell to remind us that it has happened.  “I, the Lord, have created this.”  That is, I, who alone am God, did this.  Only I could have done this.  

Declaring that he is the Creator of the heavens and the Designer of the earth, he states that he did not create it to be a waste, but designed it be lived in: in just the same way he created each human person, not to be damned but to be saved, and yet how many choose damnation rather than eternal life.

“There is no just and saving God but me.”  There is no any kind of God but our God.  For us living today, this insistence of his might seem not to pertain to us as we do not offer sacrifices to Zeus or pray to Hera, but the threat of idolatry hangs over each generation.  The idea of worship is to pay supreme honor to someone and to acknowledge their sovereignty.  This is usually displayed publicly as a sacrifice, that is, making the offering of oneself through the sign of an animal.  When we give ourselves over to the pursuit of anything other than God, we commit idolatry.  This results in our thwarting the purpose for which we were created and brings upon us great unhappiness and frustration, for “to me every knee shall bend; by me every tongue shall swear.”  God made us for himself alone.  He comes as gentle as the morning dew, but loves us like a raging fire, and demands unswerving love in return — not because he needs it, but that in loving him we find true happiness.  In the end, his “jealousy” tells us how much he wants us to be happy.