Baptism of the Lord - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2009

In today’s first Reading Isaiah was dealing with a demoralised people – a people who had been humiliated, enslaved and herded off into exile fifty years before.  They had just been informed by the Persian King, Cyrus (who had conquered their captors, the Babylonians), that they were free to return to their homeland – should they choose to do so.

But what would await them there? Their land had been occupied in the meantime by people who would not necessarily welcome them back.  Their king and his direct descendants had been killed, earlier on, by the Babylonians.  Their temple, back there in Jerusalem, was in ruins.  What priests there were among them had no personal experience of doing the things that the priests before them used to do in the temple.  Who would lead them politically and religiously?  Who would organise them?  They felt confused, and largely devoid of ideas and initiative.

Isaiah’s response was to assure them that God had not changed.  God loved them.  God had forgiven the apostasy of the generations before them.  God’s earlier dreams for his people had not changed.  God’s earlier dreams for the world’s salvation had not changed.  Their future would not all depend on them.  God would be with them – as generous and bountiful and powerful as ever.  Come to the water all you who are thirsty, though you have no money, come!  Buy corn without money, and eat, and, at no cost, wine and milk.

But things certainly had changed, and it wouldn’t simply be “business as usual”.  They would need to sit lightly with the radically changed scene and their own confusion in face of it.  They would need to learn to think outside the square, to let go of much that was familiar – the tried and the true, and be open to the new and the different: My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways not your ways..  Yes, the heavens are as high above the earth as my ways are above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts.

What were they to do?  The answer was clear: Listen, listen to me, and you will have good things to eat and rich food to enjoy.  Pay attention, come to me, listen, and your soul will live…. Seek Yahweh while he is still to be found, call to him while he is still near.  What they had previously looked to their kings to do for them, God would enable them to do for themselves: With you I will make an everlasting covenant out of the favours promised to David.  See, I have made you a witness to the peoples.

I think that this reading from Isaiah is a great reading for us today.  Over the past forty years, things have changed in our world and in our Church.  A lot of people, at least among the older ones, feel  bewildered.  How might Isaiah’s sense of God speak to us?...  I’ll tell you how it speaks to me.

1.  The first thing:  God is near; so our primary task is to learn to recognise him.  Seek Yahweh while he is still to be found, call to him while he is still near.  Or, as God said through Isaiah: Listen, listen to me, and you will have good things to eat and rich food to enjoy.  Pay attention, come to me, listen, and your soul will live….

2.  Listening for him will mean sitting lightly with much of what we have been used to, and to accept that a changed situation calls for a changed response.  We need to be open to surprises, to let God surprise us: My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways not your ways.. Yes, the heavens are as high above the earth as my ways are above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts.

3.  We don’t have just to try harder and harder and harder, as though everything depends on us.  Certainly, our alert cooperation is essential, but it is God who is the source of blessing: Come to the water all you who are thirsty, though you have no money, come! Buy corn without money, and eat, and, at no cost, wine and milk.  Why spend money on what is not bread, your wages on what fails to satisfy?

4.  And just as Isaiah saw the people being able to carry on without the structured kingship as they had previously known it, so, too, in today’s world, the things that priests usually did may change, but the Church’s mission will continue through a responsive and empowered laity – as had always been Jesus’ intention.