The Lord Comes with Merciful Power, Second Tuesday of Advent, December 11, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Second Week of Advent
December 11, 2018
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 would have heard Saturday if we didn’t have the Immaculate Conception proper readings, 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 children’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 to help the people recognize the contrast between God’s word and everything else not associated with God and we need to be Isaiah’s 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, 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, embrace, 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 outside 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 Pope St. Damasus, whose papacy is known above all for two things. First, the promotion of the cult of the martyrs, whose tombs he made possible to visit and adorned with poetic verses to teach pilgrims about the meaning of their lives and deaths. They were the ones who continued the Good Shepherd’s mission of mercy, risking and giving their lives for his lost sheep, including those who would end the earthly lives of the martyrs themselves. The second thing is for authorizing St. Jerome to translate the Bible anew from its original languages into the common language of the people, Latin (the “Vulgate”). As Isaiah told us today, “The word of our God stands forever,” and part of that word, translated by St. Jerome, is “Give thanks to the Lord for he his good, for his mercy endures forever.” Part of it is also, “Comfort, give comfort to my people.” The Verbum Domini leads us to the Verbum caro factum est, and strengthens us so that we might, as Mary did, enflesh the word of God and proclaim that mercy from a “high mountain” at the “top of our voice.”
• As we come forward 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