You, O Lord, are our Father,
Isaiah 63:16b-17, 64:2-7
our Redeemer from of old is your name.
O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways
and harden our heart, so that we fear you not?
Return for the sake of your servants,
the tribes of your heritage.
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
and that the nations might tremble at your presence!
When you did awesome things that we did not look for,
you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
From of old no one has heard
or perceived by the ear,
no eye has seen a God besides you,
who acts for those who wait for him.
You meet him who joyfully works righteousness,
those who remember you in your ways.
Behold, you were angry, and we sinned;
in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?
We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us,
and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.
Most of Israelite history during the divided kingdom period was a continual round of lawlessness, injustice and idolatry interspersed with brief periods of godly rule. The Lord warned the people back when they were still wanderers that if they persisted in wickedness, they would inevitably be removed from the land (Deuteronomy 28). Here, Isaiah projects forward hundreds of years after his time to when God made good on that promise, and the people were exiled in Babylon.
Here, the prophet, giving voice to the thoughts of the people, talks about how all of them have become unclean due to sin, and even their good deeds are soiled by hypocrisy, making them unacceptable to God. The Jews even have the audacity to accuse God of causing them to wander from His ways, when in fact it was their own hardness of heart that led them to do that.
Despite this, they do not lose hope that God would eventually grant them salvation. Eventually, their period of exile would end. However, they would never recover the old glory. Their exile from Babylon was just their lessser exile. Their greater exile was their exile in sin, which persisted even after they returned to their land. We see this in the post-Exilic prophets, who complain of injustices that persist in Israel long after they’ve returned. The people’s hearts have not changed, and something needed to be done about that.
This would only be remedied hundreds of years later when the Messiah would come. He would provide the deliverance from that greater exile, not just for the people of Israel, but for the whole world. And as we begin the season of Advent, we thinking about how God was preparing the world for the Saviour, and how we look forward to His coming again to save us from sin.
Missal Reflections 