The Comfort God Is Coming to Give His People, Second Tuesday of Advent, December 6, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Second Week of Advent
Memorial of St. Nicholas, Bishop
December 6, 2022
Is 40:1-11, Ps 96, Mt 18:12-14

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click here:

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• When Handel wrote his famous Messiah in 1741 to summarize salvation history and tell the story of Jesus the Messiah, the first words in the entire oratorio, what we might call the theme of the whole work, he took from today’s passage: God is, at it were, addressing the entire heavenly court of angels saying, “Comfort, give comfort to my people,” now in exile in Babylon. Everything Jesus would do could be summarized by the comfort he was bringing. What comfort is that? It’s mercy: that Israel’s guilt has been expiated, her service of prayer and reparation is all over. Even though there would be a first fulfillment of this in the return of the exiled Jews to Jerusalem, the prophecy was pointing even more to the return from the exile from the Garden of Eden, the exile from sin. When we pray in the Psalm verse, “The Lord our God comes with power,” we need to remember that his power is mercy. He “com-forts” us, literally makes us “strong with” the power of his merciful love. But we need to cooperate with that merciful strengthening.
• The passage from the Prophet Isaiah continues today with words made even more famous by St. John the Baptist, as we heard on Sunday: “In the desert prepare the way of the Lord! Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God! Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low; The rugged land shall be made a plain, the rough country, a broad valley.” We need to do the work to prepare for the Lord’s mercy through examining our sins, confessing them, repenting of them, repairing the damage. The Lord’s way, as we heard yesterday, is a way of highway of holiness that, as we heard Saturday, is the one the Lord himself from behind indicates to us as the path to take and on which the redeemed shall walk. Preparing and taking this path of mercy and repentance is what the Messiah wants from us to fulfill his work. Then what Isaiah says we will behold: “Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together. This will lead to people seeing the glory of the Lord.”
• Part of making straight that path for the Lord to come to comfort us is to recognize the vanity of earthly things in comparison to the perennial stability of the word of God. That’s what God tells Isaiah to announce when he asks, “What shall I cry out?” The Lord responds, “All flesh is grass, and all their glory like the flower of the field. …Though the grass withers and the flower wilts, the word of our God stands forever.” This is an important message for us to capture in order to live Advent well. Today a real danger in the living of Advent is that we get particularly children’s but almost everyone’s hearts focused so much on things that “wither,” whether material things or ephemeral celebrations rather than for the Word of God who comes to dwell among us. Isaiah was sent to help the people of his time and at all times recognize the contrast between God’s word and everything else not associated with God. We need to heed his message and become Isaiahs for our modern commercialized age, praising the generosity of those who sacrifice to give to others, but at the same time, not sacrificing for vain things, unintentionally helping to distort others’ value structures.
• As soon as Isaiah has helped people to appreciate the true value of the Word of God, then God instructs him to go up to Mount Zion as a herald of good news and and cry out at the top of his voice, “Here is your God! Here comes with power the Lord God.” This is the essential Advent message: God is coming! He’s coming with his power but he is also coming with tenderness: he will feed his flock like a shepherd, gather the lambs in his arms, carry them, and lead them with care. At the fulfillment of the long Advent of the Jews, that’s exactly what God himself did. Jesus would use these images to describe his own vocation as the Good Shepherd. He would do far more than just feed, gather, carry and lead. He would also die out of love for his sheep, in order precisely to envelope us in his mercy.
• We see a glimpse of the Good Shepherd’s comfort and consolation in the Gospel. Jesus is a shepherd who leaves the 99 and goes after the one and ignites a celebration when he finds the sheep and brings him home. This shows how personally the Good Shepherd cares for each of us. In St. Luke’s Gospel, he would link this specifically to his mission of mercy (Lk 15), saying heaven rejoices more for the return of one lost sheep than for 99 who didn’t need to repent. John Paul II once said about the Sacrament of Penance that that’s where the love of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, where all God’s power, exist just for us as an individual. Whereas at a Mass God can feed all of us at the same time with his Word and his Body and Blood, in the Sacrament of his Mercy, everything in a sense stops as God cares for every sheep, lamb or ewe personally. The Sacrament of Mercy is where mountains are leveled and shallow valleys filled in. It’s where rough ways are made smooth and crooked ways made straight. It’s where we recognize and admit that we’ve set our hearts too often on vain things instead of treasuring God’s word. It’s God’s great “lost and found” department. It’s where we see the glory of the Lord, his mercy, and where we are helped to become the glory of God by becoming fully alive (St. Ireneus: gloria Dei vivens homo). So this Advent it is key for all of us to receive the comfort and tender love of the Good Shepherd one-on-one in the Sacrament of Penance, and allow Jesus to start the celebration.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a great saint who received God’s mercy and was so transformed by it that he became an image of the Good Shepherd in caring for the Lord’s sheep, lambs and ewes. St. Nicholas was born in the town of Patara in the Roman Province of Asia, which is now southern Turkey. He grew up in the light of faith, formed in a good Christian home. After his parents both died when he was young, and before he would enter training to become a priest and then later become the Bishop of Myra (modern day Demre, Turkey), he was already following the Lord, acting on the Lord’s summons to love God with all he had and love his neighbor as Christ does. We see this, while he was still a layman, in the famous story of his help for a poor family in Patara. The culture of the time looked at women as burdens of the men who were responsible for them. In order for a girl to marry, the father had to provide her with a dowry so that her new husband would be able to pay for her upkeep, at least for some period of time. Families without money for a dowry often couldn’t get their daughters married. One poor father didn’t know what to do for his three daughters for whom there was a danger, if he were to die or be incapable of work, that they would be driven or drawn into prostitution for survival. Nicholas heard of the family’s situation and one night threw a bag of gold coins through the family’s open window, enough for the dowry for the oldest daughter who was soon married. The next night, Nicholas threw in another bag, sufficient for the dowry of the middle daughter, who likewise was married. The third night Nicholas tossed a third bag to help marry the third daughter of the father, who was waiting this time to find out who was the anonymous benefactor. The generosity of Saint Nicholas is continued through the generosity of Santa Claus (a translation of St. Nicholas) every Christmas, when all of us, like St. Nicholas, pay forward the generosity we have received from Christ. As a bishop he continued courageously to give comfort to God’s people, to help others prepare the way of the Lord and keep it free of debris, to cry out at the top of his voice as a herald of Good News “Here is your God!” and cares for us a shepherd his flock. He was one of the fathers at the Council of Nicaea, which helped respond to the heresy of Arianism, which taught that Jesus really wasn’t God, just the greatest man who had ever lived. He worked hard so that the Church and the world would look at Jesus not just as a prophetic carpenter, not just as the Messiah, but as God himself who has come with power and rules by his strong arm upraised to impart mercy. Today he wants to help us like he helped the people of his day. He wants to throw in not a bag of coins as a dowry but to point us to how Jesus has not only given us the dowry of his merciful love but then come as Bridegroom.
• Today we thank the Lord for speaking tenderly not just to Jerusalem but to New York. And we ask him who like a Shepherd feeds his flock to feed us with himself as we gather him into our arms and mouths and carry Him within our bosom!

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Reading 1
IS 40:1-11

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