Father Thomas Welbers' Homily	Jump back to Homily Index
First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2002 Mark 13:33-37	Listen to Audio

For four weeks each year, the Church stands in the place of the people of Israel, of the Old Testament, waiting for the fullness of God’s salvation to come, and not even being quite sure what it is that they were waiting for.

It’s easy and glib – and really quite unfair – to judge Old Testament times from our own Christian perspective.  We believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Savior foretold by the prophets – the one whom the Jewish people of old were waiting for.  From our perspective, we find it hard to understand why they could have rejected one so clearly foretold by the prophets.  But we see the Old Testament events and prophecies in hindsight, which, as they say, is always 20-20.  It wasn’t so simple for people living in those days – 500 or more years before Christ.  What was happening then?  What was it like?  The Church’s liturgy invites us to walk through Advent with the Prophet Isaiah, so my homilies on the Sundays of Advent will focus on the message of the first reading to help us understand the prophet Isaiah, and so to appreciate a little more this time of preparation as experienced by the Jewish people before Christ.

There were two great and pivotal events of the Jewish people in Old Testament times, events that formed their awareness of who they were as God’s Chosen People.  First, the Exodus – their liberation from Egypt by the miraculous power of God, together with the 40-year sojourn in the desert and their conquest and settlement of the Promised Land.  We are all very familiar with the story of Moses, leading the people from slavery in Egypt, through the Red Sea, receiving the Ten Commandments, and handing over leadership to Joshua who led the people in conquest of the land of Israel.  We are less familiar, I think, with the second great event that happened about 700 hundred years later: the conquest of Jerusalem by the Assyrians, and deportation of all the Jewish leadership and prominent citizens to Babylon in 587 BC.  This is often called the Babylonian Captivity.  By the way, Babylon is in present day Iraq, a short distance from Baghdad.  Jerusalem was just about totally destroyed, but the lower-class people, the poor and the country folk who were considered useless and unprofitable were left to eke out a meager living and manage as best they could.  In Babylon, some of the wealthy Jewish leaders found a nice, comfortable life there – all they had to do was compromise, adopt Babylonian ways, and worship the gods of the Babylonians.  Others, perhaps a minority, remained faithful to God’s ways, at great personal cost and hardship, and longed for return to Jerusalem.

About 50 years later, in 538 BC, the Persians conquered the Assyrians, and let the Jewish captives return to Jerusalem.  By the way, Persia was the present-day Iran.  No, the people of those two countries, Iran and Iraq, have never gotten along!  So, when these Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem, what did they find?  A city in ruins, in the midst of a devastated land.  And the only people there to welcome them were the poor who had been left behind, who basically resented these folks who came back and thought they had a right to take over.

The book of Isaiah as we find it in our bibles is actually three distinct books or sections, written at different times, by different authors, but all under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  Inspiration does not take a way the human characteristics of the writing, but rather is an assurance of the divine presence behind the human events.  The inspired word draws us into contact with the Living God, a contact that is often messy and conflicted because of human sinfulness.

The original Isaiah is about the first two-thirds of the book as found in our Bibles, chapters 1 to 39.  Isaiah wrote during the time when the Kings of Judah were weak, and were entering unhealthy alliances with stronger powers, such as the Assyrians who would eventually invade them.  Isaiah strongly criticized their reliance on armed force and political alliances, and their failure to trust in God.

 The second section, chapters 40 to 55, were written during the captivity in Babylon, about 150 years later, by an anonymous author writing in the “spirit of Isaiah.”  This is often called the “Book of Consolation,” for it predicts a return to Jerusalem and a glorious future.  The third book, chapters 56 to 66, the end of the book, was written shortly after the return to Jerusalem, and deals with the desolation, conflict, and dashed hopes of the returned exiles.  The times when the book of Isaiah was written were indeed dangerous and turbulent, with dangerous political alliances, violence and suffering, in many ways like our own day.  Today’s reading, which we heard a few minutes ago, comes from the third section of Isaiah, after the return when the Jews were experiencing bitter disappointment and despair of ever being able to rebuild themselves as God’s people.  In this light, let’s listen to it again.

You, LORD, are our father,
our redeemer you are named forever.

Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways,
and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?

Return for the sake of your servants,
the tribes of your heritage.

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
with the mountains quaking before you,

while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for,
such as they had not heard of from of old.

No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you
doing such deeds for those who wait for him.

Would that you might meet us doing right,
that we were mindful of you in our ways!

Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful;
all of us have become like unclean people,
all our good deeds are like polluted rags;

we have all withered like leaves,
and our guilt carries us away like the wind.

There is none who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to cling to you;

for you have hidden your face from us
and have delivered us up to our guilt.

Yet, O LORD, you are our father;
we are the clay and you the potter:
we are all the work of your hands.

Standing in spirit with the returned exiles, hearing the words of this “third” Isaiah, and letting them burn on our hearts – what can we learn?  First, it is sin –our own and those of others -- that has brought evil upon us.  Placing our feelings before God, it is OK to lament and question, Why does God let us wander?  Why does God allow evil to happen?  It’s OK to question God, even to argue and fight with Him.  But . . . it’s not OK to give up!

Therefore, with the exiles of old, we experience emptiness, we taste a desolation that we are, at least in part, responsible for, but are powerless to change.

Right now, at the beginning of Advent, it is important for us to feel this emptiness – and surely there is a lot of in the world around us, to taste its pain fully – not to try to ignore or deny it, or try to fill it with vain pride, empty materialism, or the illusion of security.  But, in the midst of this desolation, to continue to trust that the God who made us, who called us to be His own, will show forth his power where we are powerless, in unexpected and surprising ways.  He will not forsake the work of his hands.

© Thomas Welbers, 2002