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Homily for Tuesday of the Second Week of Advent, 06 Dec 2022, Mt 18:12-14
Nagtatampo is the Tagalog word for sulking. This is the kind of image that I get of Israel in our first reading today—like a child who is sulking. And God is commanding the prophet to console his people after many years of exile as slaves in a foreign land.
Suddenly, Isaiah is no longer speaking like the same angry prophet that he used to be. Up to this far, he has consistently denounced Israel for their sins and consistently announced their judgment (ch. 1-39). Suddenly, from here on, (from ch. 40) all the way to the end (ch. 66), he shifts to a comforting tone. From a harbinger of bad news he becomes a messenger of good news, very much like the prophets of hope and consolation. No wonder people who are familiar with the earlier part of the book (chapters 1-39) are asking themselves, “Are we still dealing with the same author here?”
He is also addressing a situation that happened at least two hundred years later. How could he have lived for that long? He says he has been ordered by a voice to comfort his people, to speak tender words to Jerusalem, to proclaim to them a message of hope, to prepare for the Lord’s coming, for revelation of God’s glory.
But Isaiah himself is reacting to God’s command. He dares to voice out a lament about the seeming futility of what God is asking him to do. It’s like he’s saying, “What for? What is there to prepare for except death anyway? We are doomed, aren’t we? Like the grass, we are bound to wither. Like the flower of the field we are bound to wilt. We are doomed because we’re sinners! Because we have not been faithful.”
But his realization comes very quickly in the line that follows. He says, “Yes, we will wither and die but the breath of the Lord that blew upon us and caused us to live remains alive; the Word of our God endures forever!” And that thought is enough to cheer him up again. The message that he now bears is indeed good news. No, I am not being asked to prepare for the coming of a God who judges and punishes us as we deserve, or a God who will condemn us because of our sins. Not even if we have strayed, not even if we are lost and hungry and cold because of our own stupidity, not even if it was our own decision to break away from him and follow our own path or do things our own way. Here’s the good news: He comes to save us. He comes as Jesus, as “Yeshua”; his name means, “(Our) God saves!” That’s the good news!
He comes not as wolf who is about to feast on a hapless lamb that strayed and fell on the side of ravine and is now hanging on desperately to a bush. He comes rather like a Shepherd who cries tears of joy when he finds his lost sheep and celebrates like crazy.
These lines in Isaiah are probably among the most beautiful lines ever written in the Bible to describe “the God of mercy, the God who saves”. They have in fact been made into a song that we sometimes sing at communion: “Like a shepherd he feeds his flock, and gathers the lambs in his arms, holding them carefully close to his heart, leading them on…”
I am inclined to believe that these are the very lines that inspired Jesus in our Gospel today to describe God as a shepherd who decides to “leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray” because it is “not his will that a single one of his little ones be lost.”
This is also the original inspiration for that song that calls this realization an “amazing grace.” That song, by the way, is in the passive voice, not active voice. Its good news is not about a lost sheep that found its way back. No, he says, “I once was lost but now I’M FOUND!” Meaning, just when I was about to despair and think that He had forgotten me, the discovery comes as a shock— my God did not give up on me! He had been looking for me. He did not stop until he found me and brought me home. What a consoling thought indeed!
