Consolation and Comfort Homily for Monday, December 4, 2023

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Today is the First Sunday of Advent. Isaiah the prophet is both challenging and consoling. In the gospel Jesus tells us to watch and be alert. For what? For Him, of course.

Consolation and Comfort

We’re going to hear a lot from the prophet Isaiah over this season of Advent. In many ways, he’s the Advent Saint. Why is that? Well, I think we have to look at the mission of Isaiah. We have to look at what it meant for him to be a prophet and what he encountered during his time.

He was a prophet at a difficult time for Israel. Things were not going well. The faith was not robust. And people who lived in Israel were really unconcerned with God. Moreover, the king, rather than following the example of the great kings of Israel who turned to the Lord, did not do so. He, in fact, found himself in his own life seeking to find solutions that relied on his power, his wisdom, his ability.

And so the role of Isaiah is really twofold. One is the very difficult task of saying things need to change. And maybe even more difficult, you need to change. That’s the first message of Advent, that we need to change.

That doesn’t mean that we’re bad people. It doesn’t mean that we’re horrible. But it does mean that we do not always choose to follow God completely and fully. We can fall into the same trap as King Ahaz was mentioned, I think, in the Office of Readings today.

He thought he had a great idea making a treaty with a powerful nation, rather than trusting in God. It didn’t work so well.

But the second thing is what’s most important. I mentioned that one way to divide Isaiah is the book of woe and the book of consolation. What is the consolation? The consolation is our relationship with God. And so in this first reading, we get this tension between woe and consolation. On the one hand, we’re invited to recognize that the great promise of God is far greater than we could imagine.

While at the same time, being told that we will be accountable for the way we live. It’s not just do whatever we want because God loves us and he’ll take us anyway. There’s a certain way in which we have to live. There’s a certain way in which we need to enter into our relationship with Jesus.

And that, in fact, is the purpose of Advent. To shake us up a little bit so that we are watching and waiting and being ready to see the presence of Jesus in our hearts and in our lives. Being reminded of the great promise that only gets fulfilled when he comes again. And being reminded that in everything, God loves us more than we can know or understand.

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