Thursday of the 2nd Week in Advent
Readings of the day: Isaiah 41:13-20; Psalm 145:1, 9, 10-11, 12-13ab; Matthew 11:11-15
Has anybody here ever experienced feeling completely powerless or helpless? Of course, we have all been powerless or helpless at one point in our lives, when we were all babies or small children. But babies do not have full consciousness that they are helpless; totally dependent on their mothers, fathers, and other caregivers for survival. When adults or older children are helpless or powerless, do we not feel helpless or powerless?
This was the problem of the people of
Israel to whom the prophet Isaiah speaks in our first reading: They felt their powerlessness; their
helplessness in the midst of the Babylonian Exile. They had been deported to a
foreign nation. Their own nation and its centerpiece, the Temple of Jerusalem,
lay in ruins. The people of Israel had developed a “little guy complex,” in the
words of today’s reflection on our readings from the Creighton University Daily
Reflections website[1]
(a website I recommend to all of us who want another great way to follow the
daily Mass readings).
The exiled people of Israel had come to
feel that they were helpless against the Babylonians; that they were a mere
“worm” or “maggot.” Isaiah does not use these words in a derogatory way, but to
challenge the people of Israel on their own feeling of inferiority.
God has a history of choosing the
“little guy” to do great things: Abraham as our father in faith; Moses to lead
Israel out of Egypt; the prophets to speak for God when Israel is at its most
helpless. Isaiah’s message to Israel and to us is that God will once again
choose the “little guy,” who will rise to greatness because of God.
Our God will deliver Israel from exile;
just wait, Isaiah says to the people. God will turn the “wasteland”; the ruins;
the desert into “a marshland”; into “springs of water” that recall the Temple
of Jerusalem; the kingdom of Israel as it once was and will be again, under
God. Our God will choose Israel; has already chosen the “little guy” as the
instrument of its own rebuilding. This is counter-intuitive for a people that
has slipped into a “little guy complex.” And so Isaiah reminds them with some
energy: God will choose and build up the “little guy,” Israel, so “that all may
see and know, observe and understand, that the hand of the LORD has done this; the
Holy One of Israel has created it.”
These are profound words from Isaiah!
The message of our reading from Matthew’s Gospel is similar. Once again, God
has chosen the “little guy,” John the Baptist, to announce that the reign of God
is here in the person of Jesus Christ. And yet Jesus says this of John: “Among
those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist.”
Once again, God has chosen the “little
guy,” a reminder to us in the times we feel powerless and helpless. And this
“little guy,” John the Baptist, was the herald of another person who began as a
“little guy” in a manger in Bethlehem: Powerless; helpless, and yet our King;
our Savior; our Lord, Jesus the Christ.
[1]
George Butterfield, “Daily Reflection, December 11, 2014.” http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/Collaborative
Ministry/121114.html. Accessed 11 December 2014.
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