Hold On

A Reflection on the First Reading for Sunday, December 3rd, 2023:
First Sunday of Advent

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Isaiah
63.1617; 64.1, 3-8

​You, O Lord, are our father;
“Our Redeemer from of old” is your name.
Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from your ways
and harden our heart, so that we do not fear you?
Turn back for the sake of your servants,
for the sake of the tribes that are your heritage.

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence.
When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past no one has heard,
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who works for those who wait for him.

You meet those who gladly do right,
those who remember you in your ways.

But you were angry, and we sinned;
because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name,
or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us,
and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Gosh. It’s the first week of Advent, and the theme is “Hope.” I feel like Isaiah didn’t get the memo here. Hope is hard to spot in Isaiah’s words. 

He describes the people of Israel and, spiritually, they’re not in great shape. No one is worshipping God with integrity. No one seems to remember that He alone is their salvation. They might be obeying laws, going through the motions, and saying the right words. But no one has faith.

Again and again, Isaiah’s words had me thinking about the woman who hemorrhaged for twelve years, whom we meet in the Gospel of Saint Mark. She embodies Isaiah’s Israel. She is an “unclean” person, with her “polluted rags” (menstrual cloths). Each of her twelve years of bleeding is one of the tribes who have abandoned God. Her fruitless efforts to be healed are like the Hebrews turning to other idols and worshipping false gods.

Ah, but all is not lost. She hears that Jesus is coming, and she enters the throng. She, as Isaiah says, “rouses”  herself “to cling to” God. In fact, when Jesus asks “Who touched me?” the word in Greek He used for “touched” is from haptomai, which can mean “to cling to.” Pseudo-Chrysostom, an anonymous early Church writer, says Christ’s healing comes out of Him through His own will – but the person must “touch Him by faith.” 

When the woman touched Him, clung to Him, Christ knew the difference. He knew that, despite dozens or hundreds of people touching Him, someone had clung to Him. Pseudo-Chrysostom explains: “But the Lord asked, who touched me, that is in thought and faith, for the crowds who throng me cannot be said to touch me, for they do not come near to me in thought and in faith.”

I wonder how many times I have been with Jesus and “touching Him” but really only been a member of the crowd. Jostling Him, not clinging to Him.

Because she roused herself to cling to Him, the reality of her wholeness comes to her. Christ tells her that her faith has healed her – not that her faith “will” heal her, but that it “has” healed her. “That is, in that thou hast believed, thou hast already been made whole,” says Saint Bede the Venerable.

So therein lies our hope in this gloomy passage from Isaiah. Despite our uncleanliness and waywardness, our faith has healed us. We have believed and been made whole. We will stand out from the crowd when we cling to Him in thought and in faith.




Kate Mosher

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