Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: Isaiah

  • Saint John of the Cross

    Saint John of the Cross

    Today’s readings

    Today at Mass we hear from three prophets.  A prophet is a person who helps us to see God.  And during Advent these prophets help us to see God coming to be born in us.

    And we have to admit: lots of times we don’t see God.  We’re either too busy to notice God, or too wrapped up in ourselves to care about God, or just completely disinterested in the whole notion of God.  Sometimes we just don’t want to see God because we would rather be doing what we want to do and not what’s best for ourselves or others.  God can see through all of that, and prophets help us to see through it too.

    We hear from three prophets today.  The first is the prophet Isaiah, and we heard from him in today’s first reading.  The people of Israel had turned away from God a whole lot.  God often made a new covenant with them, and then after a while, they would lose interest and get distracted and turn away from God all over again.  So in today’s reading, Isaiah is trying to wake them up once again.  He tells them if they had stayed on the right path, the path God marked out for them when he made a covenant with them, if they had followed his commands, they would have been blessed by good fortune, many descendants, and a rich land and nation that would never have been destroyed.  It’s too late for that now, but maybe by seeing what caused their misfortune, they can turn back to God and let him heal them.  Which is something God is always longing to do.

    The second prophet we hear from today is St. John the Baptist, and we hear about him in today’s Gospel reading.  Jesus is frustrated with people of Israel – again! – because just about nothing could get their attention.  When John the Baptist went around fasting and staying away from strong drink, the people thought he was weird and couldn’t relate to his message to repent of their sins.  But when Jesus came along asking them to repent also, he ate and drank just as they did, so they judged him harshly and wouldn’t listen to him either.  They always had an excuse, and of course it was never their fault.  Kind of sounds like us sometimes, doesn’t it?  Basically, no matter who was calling them to reform their lives and no matter how they proclaimed that message, the people wanted to do what they wanted to do, and nothing was going to persuade them to change.

    The third prophet we hear from today is Saint John of the Cross, whose feast we celebrate today.  Saint John of the Cross was a Carmelite friar, a kind of monk who was vowed to poverty, chastity and obedience.  He was called by God and by his friend, Saint Teresa of Avila, to reform the Carmelite Order.  The Carmelites had relaxed some of their rules over time, and had basically turned away from the life that had been envisioned when the Order started.  Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila founded a reformed Carmelite Order, and Saint John suffered for it terribly.  In those days, religious affairs were all tied up in the government of the nation, and so there was a lot of politics.  People didn’t agree with Saint John, so he was taken prisoner for over nine months.  Even when he was released, his fellow friars who didn’t agree with him went around to all the monasteries making trouble for him.  He was oppressed for his preaching of reform almost until the day he died.

    Each of these prophets had been given a message by God.  Isaiah and Saint John the Baptist called the people of Israel to turn back to God.  Saint John of the Cross called his fellow Carmelites to turn back to the ideals on which their Order was founded.  All of them suffered for their witness to the truth.  Prophets don’t usually have an easy life.  But if we will get past the politics and get over ourselves, we might hear from them a call that leads us back to God who will make us happier than we’ve ever been.

    During Advent, we remember that Christ is always near to us, and we remember that we must always turn back to him and let him be born in our hearts once again, stronger than ever.  And so during Advent, we hear from the great prophets like Isaiah, John the Baptist, and John of the Cross who are calling us to turn back to God and to prepare a way for Christ in our lives, in our hearts, and in our world.

    Today in our Psalm we hear what God is trying to tell us through all these prophets:

    Blessed the one who follows not
    the counsel of the wicked
    Nor walks in the way of sinners,
    nor sits in the company of the insolent,
    But delights in the law of the LORD
    and meditates on his law day and night.

    And we will be happy too, if we hear God’s call through the prophets and follow in his ways.

  • Second Sunday of Advent

    Second Sunday of Advent

    Today’s readings

    “Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God.”

    So the prophet Isaiah begins our Liturgy of the Word today.  Those words made me think back to a time many years ago when I sang in a “Do It Yourself Messiah.”  Such “Do It Yourself Messiahs” are Christmas traditions in many places.  This particular program was being put on at my voice teacher’s church, and I had been practicing the first song of it, which is called “Comfort Ye My People,” for months.  I was to sing it as a solo.  Now understand, the prospect of a voice student singing in a church he’d never been to for people he’d never met, and being the fist voice they’d hear that afternoon – well that experience was just a little daunting.  I was feeling anything but comfort!

    But the text of that particular song is taken directly from the first three verses we get from Isaiah today.  This text is easily one of the most beautiful in all of Scripture, and I have to admit it’s always been one of my favorite parts of the Bible.  But as I reflected on it this week, the words almost seem to ring a bit hollow.  The headlines in the newspaper spoke of 533,000 jobs lost in just the month of November – the worst unemployment statistic in 34 years; a $14 billion bailout of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler; the deepening of foreclosures in the housing market, fueled this time by job losses – and we can’t forget the recent bombings in India, and the wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of unrest in other areas.

    And I know that as I say all that, there are some of you here who probably didn’t need to read it in a newspaper.  Either you have had to suffer from some of this, or someone you know did.  And so I can’t help but think that Isaiah’s promise of comfort seems to ring a bit hollow today.  So this comfort of which Isaiah speaks, when’s that going to start?

    Advent certainly has snuck up on us this year, I think.  We’re all in different places now than we were just a year ago.  Even if the recession and the danger in foreign lands hasn’t affected us, we might have experienced the loss of a loved one, a serious illness or injury of someone we know or even ourselves, maybe even a broken relationship.  Maybe these times find us needing the peace that Isaiah proclaims now more than ever.

    So I think the comfort that Advent finds us hoping for this year is not some kind of placid, easy comfort.  It’s not going to be found in hot chocolate or mashed potatoes, or even being wrapped in a warm blanket next to the fire.  It’s not the kind of comfort that prohibits us from trying something new, or taking a risk – God has no great love for that kind of comfort, to be quite honest.  And it’s not going to be the kind of comfort that waves a magic wand and makes all our troubles go away.

    I think the kind of comfort that Isaiah wants us to know about is the kind of comfort that comes from being in a hard place and having someone walk through it with you.  There is a real comfort that comes from that.  And that, I think, is the authentic kind of comfort that God brings us in our daily struggles.  We all know that our frustrations don’t disappear as quickly as we’d like them to.  We all know that we would certainly prefer not to have to walk through those low points at all.  But our faith teaches us that when we do walk through those valleys, we are never ever alone.  God is there, bringing us his comfort.

    And truly, this is the kind of comfort Isaiah is speaking about.  This reading is from the second part of the book of Isaiah.  In the first part, Isaiah was crying out to the people, warning them that God was not happy with the way they had turned away from him, that God was angry about the way they treated the poor and broke the commandments and didn’t trust in him.  But the second part – from which today’s first reading is taken – speaks to a people who were suffering the consequences of those sins.  They had been taken into exile; their homes and everything they knew were destroyed and now they lived as slaves, bitterly oppressed in a foreign land.  They too had no love for someone proclaiming a false comfort.  But Isaiah wasn’t proclaiming that kind of comfort or peace.  He was proclaiming a comfort and peace that could only come from God.

    And so it’s the great Saint John the Baptist who has the fulfillment of the promise in today’s Gospel reading.  These are the opening words of the Gospel of Mark, of which we will be reading a lot in this coming Liturgical year.  Mark has preliminaries: no genealogy like Matthew, no story about Elizabeth or the Annunciation like Luke.  He seems to rush breathlessly in and get right to the point, beginning with John’s Baptism.  He takes up the message of Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”  The old promises are being fulfilled and we are being offered a new way of life, one that finds us filling in the valleys and straightening out all those rough and winding roads.

    I find myself in these Advent days reflecting on some of my favorite Advent hymns.  The one that really expresses the Scriptures we have today is called “Comfort, Comfort Ye My People.”  It was written for the feast of the Birth of St. John the Baptist by German composer Johannes Olearius in 1671.  It was translated into English in the nineteenth century.

    Comfort, comfort ye My people,
    Speak ye peace, thus saith our God;
    Comfort those who sit in darkness,
    Mourning ’neath their sorrow’s load;
    Speak ye to Jerusalem
    Of the peace that waits for them;
    Tell her that her sins I cover,
    And her warfare now is over.

    For the herald’s voice is crying
    In the desert far and near,
    Bidding all men to repentance,
    Since the kingdom now is here.
    O that warning cry obey!
    Now prepare for God a way!
    Let the valleys rise to meet Him,
    And the hills bow down to greet Him.

    So Advent this year finds us waiting for two things.  First, we hear the call to repentance and await our own wholehearted return to God.  We are probably not going to get any part of the $700 billion government bailout.  We are going to have to depend instead on God in ways different and much deeper than we ever have before.  And that’s certainly not bad news, because nothing is more dependable than God.  Which brings us to the second thing for which we wait, and that is God’s comfort, a comfort that walks with us through good times and bad, a comfort that never lets us down, a comfort that makes us completely new.  We pray for that comfort along with our Psalmist today: “Lord, let us see your kindness and grant us your salvation.”