Second Sunday in Course 2023
When one counts up the verses making up today’s Scripture readings, it becomes obvious that the quantity of Bible is very small–seventeen total verses in three proclaimed readings and one responsorial psalm. That means that either the committee who put together the lectionary some fifty years ago was in a hurry, or–more likely–that there’s plenty of God’s loving communication right in seventeen verses. The Word of God today is, in scientific language, very, very dense. Lots of meaning in very few words.
Let’s consider an analogous situation in the weather. About this time of winter, the U.S. is often dominated by two kinds of weather patterns. The first is called a “bomb cyclone,” where pressures drop so quickly that high winds and rain or snow just bombard an area of the land. The other is labeled an “atmospheric river,” generally striking ocean coasts on the west of a land mass, which can dump the equivalent of the Mississippi River flow every day on the land. That is what I call “dense weather.”
In the supernatural realm, were you aware that there is a spiritual atmospheric river just outside our reach every moment of our lives? That’s the river of divine grace, the very life of the Trinity, that God’s Spirit makes available to those with faith. And God even provides the faith to those who open themselves to Him. Isaiah, our prophet of the day, lived–in his own words–as a man with unclean lips, amid a people of unclean lips and hearts. It’s easy for us to be distracted by the beautiful, sensual world that God put us into, is it not? That’s what had happened, over and over, to Isaiah’s people, Israel, to God’s people, Israel. God established His people to worship with right praise and live morally, and attract the whole world to right praise and right living. But also remember that the word “Israel,” given to the patriarch Jacob after a divine wrestling match, the word means “God fighter.” Often they turned their backs on Him because of their base instincts taking control. They–and we–tend not to wait patiently for the Lord, and tend not to do His will.
Human beings, not just the Israelites, find delight in food and wine, and they say, “that’s good–let’s have more of it.” And so we overindulge. We let our appetites for food, drink, leisure, and romance run wild, and turn God’s gifts to us into little gods to serve our own egos. And these sins tear us apart. They separates man and woman. Think of the thousands of marriages that have been fractured by pornography and adultery. Consider the families that have been ruined by get-rich-quick schemes, or the children ruined by abuse. All of these human actions just build little or big moral dams that prevent God’s grace from filling us and making us happy.
St. John the Baptist, beginning his ministry about the year 30 AD, called the Israelites to repentance, just as Isaiah had done dozens of generations earlier. But there was a big difference in their ministries. Isaiah was not the cousin of the Messiah; John was. John knew, as all the prophets did, that Israel’s problem was sin, deliberately turning from God’s law. He symbolically helped the Jews and Gentiles to see that, and to submit to his baptism which showed their willingness to turn away from sin. But he could not take away sin. For that, humans needed a sacrifice that was so perfect, so impossibly giving, that participating in it could make a man or woman just as fit for God’s kingdom as Adam and Eve had been before their rebellion. And John saw the sacrificial victim, the true Passover Lamb, and identified Him. He was Jesus, both Messiah and Passover Lamb. He ranks ahead of John because He was and is divine–the very Son of God. And He baptizes with more than water. He baptizes with the very Spirit of God.
St. Paul, writing to the Corinthian church not too many years after Christ’s death and resurrection, writes to them as what we call “sinners becoming saints.” He knows that sin has torn the community apart, so he teaches the Corinthians that they can be made into saints, but only by coming together “with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Very rarely is anyone saved all by himself or herself. The supernatural river of God’s love is most commonly, and vividly, experienced in a Christian community. There we can together share the sacramental presence of God’s grace, of God’s very life. Here we can celebrate coming together with and in Christ through Baptism and Eucharist. So let’s all consider this week what obstacles, what sins we have placed in the path of God’s river of love, and ask Him to help us push them out of the way so we can experience and share that torrent of grace.
