Today’s responsorial psalm has a plea which captures the mood of Advent: “Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.” It is a heartfelt prayer, simple in its aim. The psalmist wants mercy; he wants God’s kindness and salvation. He wants God to respond and intervene because the harshness of life and the anxieties of the world can overwhelm us.
The Prophet Isaiah – or better, Deutero-Isaiah, or Second Isaiah, as scholars refer to him – was facing this harshness of life. His fellow Israelites had been defeated in war and enslaved in Babylon. They realized their guilt and accepted their punishment, but their servitude was a bitter humiliation. So the words of today’s psalmist found a ready place on their lips: “Lord, let us see your mercy, and grant us your salvation.”
But this plea was only one side of a back-and-forth between God and his people. Even as the people were acknowledging their misery, God was promising to renew his covenant with them and intervene on their behalf. Speaking through Isaiah, he said: “Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and proclaim to her that her service is at an end, her guilt is expiated; indeed, she has received from the hand of the Lord double for all her sins.” This is the rhythm of Advent: a plea for kindness, a promise of comfort and expiation; a longing for salvation, and a promise that exceeds what the mind can conceive. Back and forth – a kind of marvelous exchange with the creature imploring and the creator intervening.
We see something similar in the scene from today’s gospel. “People of the whole Judean countryside and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem were going out…and were being baptized by (John) in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins.” It must have been quite a sight. John standing there, clothed in camel’s hair, and the people going down into the Jordan, confessing their sins: “Lord, let us see your mercy, and grant us your salvation.” And John, in turn, responding, “One mightier than I is coming after me…I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the holy spirit.” Back and forth, back and forth: each plea of the people increasing their longing for a response from God who alone could calm their anxiety.
Even we, brothers and sisters, fortified as we are with the fullness of God’s promises in the Eucharist, continue this back and forth: our pleas rise up from the difficulties of life and the anxieties we face, and his words of comfort sustain us. So it will be until the final coming of the Lord Jesus. “Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.”
Copper beech tree in the Abbey garth in the snow. Homily from today's Mass by Fr. Vincent.
Copper beech tree in the Abbey garth in the snow. Homily from today's Mass by Fr. Vincent.
