Homily for Wednesday, 10 December 2014– Ferial

Wednesday of the 2nd Week in Advent

Readings of the day: Isaiah 40:25-31; Psalm 103:1-2, 3-4, 8, 10; Matthew 11:28-30

What is real strength? How do we understand and experience the strength of God? Many times I have experienced the great and inspiring hope in God that many poor, people with serious illnesses, migrants, and refugees place in God’s strength. Do we, in relative prosperity, have this depth of hope in God’s strength? Most if not all of us, I believe, have this hope, or we would not be here.

But the prophet Isaiah, in our first reading, addresses a people forced from their homeland, so weary of exile in Babylon that they have developed a distorted understanding of God’s strength. The people of Israel accuse God of not being strong enough to deliver them from exile, and so Isaiah speaks to them as if in God’s defense: “Why… do you say… O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God’”?

Isaiah’s point is that God’s strength has been with his people all along, but in their despair they have lost their sense of what God’s strength really is. God’s strength is shown in creation, Isaiah says: “Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these things.” Who has lifted up their eyes and been in awe of this planet; this universe that God has created? I have.

And yet there is more to God’s strength. The primary ways in which God’s strength is shown are in God’s mercy; humility; gentleness. God “gives strength to the fainting; for the weak he makes vigor abound,” Isaiah says; a merciful, humble, and gentle strength; a kind of strength to be trusted; a strength in which we hope. And this hope in God’s strength is central to our Advent season.

We praise God’s strength shown as mercy, humility, and gentleness in our Psalm and again in our Gospel reading today. Our God is a God of “compassion”; a God who “pardons [our] iniquities”; “heals all [our] ills”; is “merciful and gracious… slow to anger and abounding in kindness.” Our God is a God who calls us through his Son Jesus Christ: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.”

There is great truth in the words of St. Francis de Sales; favorite words of our beloved Fr. Joe Trovato here: “There is nothing so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength.”

Our reading today from Isaiah especially also reminds me of a beautiful hymn by David Haas. The refrain of this hymn is this: “We will run and not grow weary, for our God will be our strength. And we will fly like the eagle. We will rise again.”

“Our God will be our strength.” “There is nothing so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength.” We speak of the real strength of our God; strength in which we place our hope and are called to live out in our own lives; strength shown forth as mercy, humility, and gentleness.