Saturday of the First Week in Advent 2023
There’s a vivid feeling of urgency about the Advent readings from the prophet Isaiah, a constant agony about factors not under the control of Israel as they await their Messiah. Now two things are for all of Israel’s history in the foreground of their existence. First, they all live in an area of the Middle East that has no natural defensive boundaries. In the dry season, an army can just hop over the River Jordan. In all seasons, the seacoast is like a superhighway for marching divisions and chariots. And invaders from the south can just sail up the Gulf of Aqaba. So they lived in fear of the superpowers around them, and had to surrender more than once to these foes.
Second, the Holy Land, the Levant, is a dry land very dependent on the seasonal rains. So the words “bread of adversity” and “water of affliction,” which refer to solid food made with junk grain, and water dug from a polluted or dirty well, are not just metaphors. Remember that the prophet Elijah presided over a three year drought in the time of Ahab and Jezebel. So brooks running with water on the sides of mountains truly sounds like paradise to their farmers. That was the kind of promise from God that would be fulfilled in the time of the Messiah.
But not on this earth, I’m afraid. Jesus, Word of God incarnate, did not find a people ready for that kind of blessing. As in the times of the prophet, first-century Israel was a place of misery and oppression. And the religious teachers considered the common people, especially the poor and disabled, to be cursed and unworthy of their attention. So Jesus, going about the towns and villages, attracted a following when He healed and taught about the merciful, forgiving, all-powerful God. The people were harassed and helpless, so in His compassion, he helped them–as many as He could. But not as many as He wanted–there were just too many.
So He built and became the foundation of a Church with a mission of compassion, of healing and teaching and feeding, with living waters from His Sacraments. In today’s Gospel we hear Him commissioning the Twelve and sending them out as plenipotentiaries of Him, as a kind of ambassadorial college from he King. He empowered them to heal the sick, cleanse lepers, cast out demons and even raise the dead. We can see the effects already in the Acts of the Apostles, but they were doing all those things even before the Resurrection. Moreover, this continues in the Church today.
Today we remember St. Juan Diego, the visionary of Mexico whose tilma is held in veneration of the appearance of Mary in the sixteenth century. He was canonized in 2002. The most striking miracle that was presented to the Church involved a “drug addict named Juan José Barragán Silva. [He] fell 10 meters (33 ft) head first from an apartment balcony onto a cement area in an apparent suicide bid. His mother Esperanza, who witnessed the fall, invoked Juan Diego to save her son who had sustained severe injuries to his spinal column, neck and cranium (including intra-cranial hemorrhage). Barragán was taken to the hospital where he went into a coma from which he suddenly emerged on May 6, 1990.” Very much like the resuscitation of a dead man. But in more pedestrian ministries, consider that the Church has with medical missions and hospitals helped more sick people over the centuries than anyone else. The Holy Spirit continues to work in Christians all over the world, in many different expressions and denominations, to spread the compassion of Christ.
