The Comfort of the Coming of the Good Shepherd, Second Tuesday of Advent, December 7, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Second Week of Advent
Memorial of Saint Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor
December 7, 2021
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 deeply 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 holiness that, as we heard Saturday, is the one the Lord himself indicates and on which the redeemed shall walk. But 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 first 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 grasp 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 recognize the contrast between God’s word and everything else not associated with God and we need to be 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 the ewes 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. That’s where mountains are leveled and shallow valleys filled in. That’s where rough ways are made smooth and crooked ways made straight. That’s where we recognize and admit that we’ve set our hearts too often on vain things instead of treasuring God’s word. That’s God’s great “lost and found” department. That’s where we see the glory of the Lord, where we see God’s 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 the Church celebrates the feast of Saint Ambrose. He was one who heard the summons to receive God’s mercy, did, and then became an image of the Good Shepherd in caring for the Lord’s sheep, lambs and ewes. In his young 30s, in the early 370s, the future St. Ambrose was prefect of Gaul — an enormous responsibility. He was intrigued by the Christian faith, we could say he even believed it, but he really hadn’t met Christ in a way that could get him to change his priorities and get baptized. After the death of the Bishop of Milan, he went to where the election was to take place to make sure that there were no fights between the Orthodox Catholics of the time and the heretic Arians (who believed that Jesus was the greatest man who ever lived and chosen by God but not God). He gave a little speech reminding everyone of Christ’s teachings on peace and mutual love, at which point someone in the crowd began to shout “Ambrose, Bishop!” It soon started to be echoed by everyone, Catholics and Arians alike. He tried to run away from what these responsibilities would mean, but when the emperor Valentinian heard of the election, he consented to it, proud that he had chosen as Prefect someone with the virtues capable of serving as a Bishop. Eventually Ambrose was baptized, then ordained a deacon, a priest, and then, on this day in 374, a bishop. After his ordinations, he set himself to going out to meet Christ who had chosen him in every way so that he could follow every step and help others to walk in the way Jesus had indicated. He sought to learn the Christian faith in such detail that he could really guide others by word and example. He learned the Word of God stands forever and sought to pass on that wisdom,becoming eventually a doctor of the Church, one of the greatest teachers in the history of the faith. This required a great deal of study under the tutelage of a priest, Simplicianus. He was already a superb administrator and leader, but he needed to become a real man of God and prayer, study and charity — as he met Christ in the tabernacle, in Scripture, in others. I’ll focus on one thing he taught the Church, which is about the gut-busting mercy we see in Jesus in today’s Gospel. The phrase, “O Felix Culpa,” “O Happy Fault,” is normally attributed to St. Augustine, whom St. Ambrose converted first by his rhetoric and then the substance of what he taught and enfleshed, but it’s a really a paraphrase of what St. Ambrose said. “The Lord knew that Adam would fall and then be redeemed by Christ,” St. Ambrose declared. “Happy ruin, which has such a beautiful reparation!” (Commentary on Psalm 39, 20). Elsewhere he said, “We who have sinned more have gained more, because your grace [of mercy, Lord] makes us more blessed than our absence of fault does” (Commentary on Ps 37, 47). And in one of the Prefaces of the Ambrosian Liturgical rite, the priest sings to God, “You bent down over our wounds and healed us, giving us a medicine stronger than our afflictions, a mercy greater than our fault. In this way even sin, by virtue of your invincible love, served to elevate us to the divine life” (Sunday XVI per annum). Jesus, the Good Shepherd and Divine Physician, comes to us with medicine more powerful than any of our afflictions. We run out to him to receive it and then, like Ambrose, we’re called to bring Jesus and that medicine to others, because the harvest is great but the laborers are few.
• 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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