1.
Good Morning. Let’s pray. O Lord, may the words of my mouth and the
meditations of our hearts be pleasing to You O Lord our Rock and our
Redeemer. Amen.
2.
Opening Comments: So today is the
First Sunday of Advent. It’s a time for looking both backward and forward.
We look backward as we
remember the first Advent or Coming of Christ that first Christmas day a little
more than 2,000 years ago and we look forward
to His Second Coming at the end of all days when Heaven will come to earth.
We have this magnificent
hope that if Jesus came that first time He will come a second time.
Every Sunday
in the Mass we say the words: “Christ
has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again!”
During the initial
days of the Season of Advent, the readings from the prophet Isaiah continually
speak of God's visitation, consolation and redemption of His people, while the
corresponding Gospel selections reveal Christ as the fulfillment of the Old
Testament prophetic promises.
John the Baptist first announced the coming of the Kingdom of
God quoting Isaiah the prophet:
In those
days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea 2 and saying,
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 3 This is he who was spoken
of through the prophet Isaiah: “A voice of one calling in the
wilderness,‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’” (Matt
3:1-3)
Jesus’ first public words announcing his own
ministry were also quoted from the prophet Isaiah:
18 “The
Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news
to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery
of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of
the Lord’s favor.” This was a direst quote from Isaiah chapter 61
beginning at verse 16.
Reading on: 20 Then he rolled up the scroll,
gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the
synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this
scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Isaiah 61:16-20)
This is how Jesus
chose to launch his public ministry!
Before we go any further we need to know something more about
this Prophet Isaiah and the context in which he writes for
truly he guides our journey through Advent as
we prepare for Christmas. Advent is a season of joyful anticipation, and Isaiah invites
us to look forward to the coming of the Messiah, to prepare the way for His
coming!
He was one of the greatest
of the Hebrew Prophets. In the 8th
Century BC Isaiah proclaimed the coming of the promised Messiah in great detail
and in some of the most beautiful prose in the entire Old Testament of the
Bible.
The
northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BC. Assyrian
King Sennacherib laid seige to Jerusalem in 701 BC, but Yahweh delivered the
city as Isaiah had promised. However, moral decay prevailed, and Jerusalem and
the Temple of the Lord were destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC, which led
to the Babylonian Captivity or Exile of the Jews.
The Book of
Isaiah is a collection of poems, generally divided into the Book of Judgement
(Chapters 1-39) and the Book of Consolation (Chapters 40-66). The Book contains
two of the most famous prophecies in Hebrew Scripture, that of the Virgin birth
of the Messiah (7:14) and the Servant who suffered and died for our sins
(Isaiah 52:13-53:12), identified in the New Testament with Jesus Christ.
The verses that we read
from the 63rd and 64th chapters of Isaiah are part of
what we call Second Isaiah and are a lament. They’re a cry
for help and this cry comes immediately after the Israelites have returned from their 40
years of exile in Babylon.
All of their hopes were pinned on this return. Coming home to Jerusalem
was going to mean the end of all of Israel’s shame. But things didn’t turn out
so well. Problems multiplied rather than
disappeared; ugliness and evil continued to exist.
In some ways, indeed in many ways, their situation
then is similar to our situation today - Our hopes rest
on the fact that Christ has come; Isaiiah’s prophetic promises (Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah 13:19, Isaiah 14:23, Isaiah
35:4-6, Isaiah 40:1-5,9 etc.) have
been fulfilled. But life somehow remains imperfect.
The problems of the world persists and we’re not all what we should be.
So
we begin Advent with a lament; but how do we lament?
We remind God of
his status as father and redeemer (63:16b).
Is.
63:16
. . . you, O LORD, are our Father,
our Redeemer from of old is your name.
17
Why, O LORD, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere
you? Return for the sake of your
servants, the tribes that are your inheritance.
Can you hear the sorrow, the sense of mourning,
and even complaint?
It was that sense of complaint that caught my
attention and it’s that that I felt compelled to probe!
The sense of their complaint
turned into a demand. It went something
like this: “You’re such a powerful God –
do something!!!
Would not such a God take care of us, protect
us not only from our enemies but also from ourselves and our own tendencies
towards sin? We hear this in verse 17:
Is.
63:17
¶ Why, O LORD, do you make us wander
from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you? Return for the sake of your servants, the
tribes that are your inheritance.
In these verses
we’re accusing God of causing us to wander from His ways. We’re also accusing Him of “hardening
our hearts” so that we don’t want to follow Him. Yet in the midst of such a complaint, still
we call on God to come. Come for the sake of the relationship we have with Him,
for we are his inheritance.
Now as I pondered this further I found it intriguing that
this lament – this complaint – this demand - was for God to come not as a child
– not as Immanuel i.e., God with us, but rather as a God of
terrible and awesome power. To come in
“Theophanic power and splendor!”
Their image of
God’s coming is summarized in Isaiah chapter 64 verses 1 through 3:
But something happens to Isaiah in the middle
of his lament and complaint – see if you can see it as I read from Isaiah
chapter 64 beginning at verse 5:
Is.
64:5 You
meet those who happily do what is right, who keep a good memory of the way you
work. But how angry you’ve been with us! We’ve
sinned and kept at it so long! Is there any hope for us? Can we be saved?
6 We’re all sin-infected,
sin-contaminated. Our best efforts are
grease-stained rags. We dry up like
autumn leaves—sin-dried, we’re blown off by the wind. 7
No one prays to you or makes the effort to reach out to you because
you’ve turned away from us, left us to stew in our sins.
Did you pick up on
any sense of confession in these verses – towards the end . . . We’ve sinned and kept at it so
long! Is there any hope for us? Can we be saved? 6 We’re all sin-infected,
sin-contaminated. Our best efforts are
grease-stained rags. We dry up like
autumn leaves—sin-dried, we’re blown off by the wind. 7. . . but notice what follows
immediately after this confession . . .
because
you’ve turned away from us, left us to stew in our sins.
Ah! There’s that sense of accusation – or complaint
again.
But there’s
a bit of ambiguity here don’t you think?
We
certainly hear “complaint” but don’t we also hear just the slightest hint of a
“confession” also?
Certainly there’s a sense of disquiet in
these words – It’s not all complaint and it’s certainly not all contrite
confession either!
There a sense of . . .
“Come on God – do something as you did in
days of old!”
We, like the people in Isaiah’s day, would cry
for that also don’t you think?
We want God to reveal Himself in power! Terrible power!
And this brings us to the central point of
this Homily – the fact that many of us struggle with the Incarnation!
You see, God answered Isaiah’s prayer with the Incarnation
but this isn’t what we were wanting even demanding. We wanted God to come on a charging war-horse
at the head say of a million strong hoard of armored angel warriors! Not – I repeat – NOT as a vulnerable little
baby!
You see we struggle with God’s answer in the incarnation! We want – we demand . . . God
to come in power not in apparent weakness!
Judas, the one who
finally betrayed Jesus, was, we believe, a political zealot[1] and consequently
wanted Jesus to take political power from the Roman and Jewish authorities and
establish His own worldly kingdom there in Jerusalem but when Jesus made it
clear that He was going to die on the Cross that broke the camel’s back, as it
were, and it was then, we believe, that Judas began to scheme to betray Jesus!
Like Isaiah and his
readers we want God to MAKE us His followers – to make us by His power to want
to follow Him!
But God
answers this very prayer with what at first glance seems to be a non-answer or
worse still a “No” answer!
What
many then missed and still today many miss is that God’s answer in the Baby
Jesus was, in reality, the most sublime and perfect answer He could have ever
given!
Why?
Does
anyone have an answer?
Can
anyone tell us why the Baby – His Son - was God’s most perfect and complete answer
to Isaiah’s lament?
As I wrestled with
this I finally asked myself this question:
“How is the incarnation in – the coming of Christ in flesh
- the most perfect answer to our cry – our lament - for God to come in power?”
And the answer came
to me in one word “Identification.”
God’s most perfect and more powerful – universe-shattering - answer was
His complete and utter identification with us in the baby Jesus!
God came amongst us
as one of us! Immanuel[2] – God
with us!
He loved us so much
that He completely identified with us and in doing so made Himself vulnerable
to death. He came into our contingent world encased in our appallingly
vulnerable flesh - subject to pain, corruption and death.
And what was the
power that caused Him to do this? That
terrible power – the power that ultimately overcame death in Christ’s
resurrection from the dead?
Ah – it was
love! He loved us that much that he gave
us His only Son!
Death is seen by us
as the ultimate reality for, at the end of it all, death denies the existence
of everything living. Death annihilates
every living thing! Or so this world
believes!
But does it? No – Christ’s love for us drove Him to come
amongst us as one of us. It drove Him to
submit to the world’s judgment of goodness by the torturous death of crucifixion. But death could not hold Jesus the
Christ!
It could not overcome the greatest power – the
greatest reality - of all – love!
God’s the Father’s
gift of His Son Jesus the Christ was an answer more profound and infinitely
more powerful than we would ever dream to ask for.
God answers our
demands for Him to come in power by coming as an innocent vulnerable child!
So in this Advent
Season we turn once again to the sublime mystery of the Incarnation and it’s answer
to our most fundamental fear – death – out ultimate annihilation! As we ponder this may we grow more and more
fearless as we grow more and more in love with the One about whom this Advent
is all about.
So let me close
with a poem about our Lord who is God’s Red Charity to us.
Red Charity
By Hayley L. Dalgleish
In that moment, that
ministered to all other moments meaning,
All prayers and
prophecies took particularity.
Time broke as a babe
breathed, and then time
too kept breathing,
And the Consolation
cried, covered in red charity.
Fingertips with
fingerprints, a scandal with a frame,
Words in gibberish to
words with life,
words that cut black
from white,
Then hanging on a
tree everything becoming then became,
While clothed in red
charity,
the final black to
make all white.
All of this a mission
to make lovers of men.
All men, that is, not
only the proper and prim.
Oh help us to harbor
the beauty of red, amen.
That we may love
Particularity,
that we may love Him.
Let’s pray . . .
[1] Judas
is often identified as a Zealot, an attribute held by only one other disciple,
Simon the Zealot. We know that Judas was probably a Zealot by his surname,
Iscariot. Researchers believe this is a form of the title sicarii, meaning
"dagger-men," a group of ultra-Zealots who carried a knife with them
at all times to be prepared to assassinate traitors and capitulators. In
English, we could call him Judas the Daggerman.
