This Sunday’s First Reading is from the Prophet Isaiah. But it is a rather special reading for Christians. To understand this, we need to take a brief look at what is the longest book of prophecy in the Old Testament. Isaiah falls quite neatly into three sections: Chapters 1-39, chapters 40-55 and 56-66. These are often, for convenience, referred to as First, Second and Third Isaiah.
First Isaiah contains the famous prophecies of the Messiah’s birth, of “Emmanuel; a name that means ‘God-with us’”. We all recognise passages such as “A maiden is with child…for unto us a child is born, a son is given…and they shall call him ‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’” We hear these words every year at Christmas time. Third Isaiah contains some of the glorious readings we hear after Christmas on feasts such as the Epiphany, with the visit of the Magi, in passages that remind us of the Star of Bethlehem: “Arise! Shine out! For your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you!”
But Second Isaiah is quite different. It contains, amongst much else, four Songs of the Servant of the Lord, which increasingly reveal him as a Suffering Servant. The fourth of these we always read on Good Friday, and its Christian application is unmistakable: “A man of sorrows and familiar with suffering…so disfigured did he look that he seemed no longer human…on him lies a punishment that brings him peace, and through his wounds we are healed…”
Today’s first reading is the third of these Songs of the Servant of God. It presents him as being falsely accused before the authorities of his people, despised, insulted and humiliated, but nevertheless confident that whatever he has to suffer, God will ultimately vindicate him.
Take up your Missal when you have a quiet moment, and read through this passage slowly. For a Christian it resembles so much the trial of Jesus before the Council of his own people; for he was not tried by foreigners, but by those who should most have understood whom he is, who should have recognised him when he came, but did not do so; his own people, and their leaders at that, who really should have known better.
But we should also look to ourselves. When taxed that he had portrayed the Jews as Christ-killers in his film The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson replied, “If I were to say who crucified Jesus, I’d begin with these,” and held up his own hands. In the film it is, in fact, his own hands that hammer the nails into Jesus’. The leaders of Israel may have been instrumental in securing Jesus’ crucifixion, but we must never forget that he is the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” And that means our sins; all of them.
Yes; it is our sins that nailed him to the cross. But God does not hold this against us. He wants us to come to repentance for sin, to turn back to him and seek the forgiveness that Jesus alone has won for us by his death and resurrection. Failure to do this empties the cross of Christ of meaning in our lives. “Seek the Lord while he is still to be found!” counsels the same prophet Isaiah. There is nothing more important in our lives. In the prayer of Jesus to be found in the lines of poetry affixed by the composer Gustav Mahler to the beginning of the last movement of his Third Symphony, “Father, look upon these wounds of mine. Let not one of your creatures be lost to you!” May it be so.
Fr Phillip.
