"His Word Will Not Return Void": The Second Sunday after Advent (December 4, 2022)

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

I want to start off with a brief thought experiment. Place yourself in the shoes of an ancient Israelite around the time of 597 BC. You have just watched in horror as what you previously perceived as impossible happened: a pagan nation has invaded your country, a nation that you considered to be God’s chosen people, they destroyed the Temple, the dwelling place of God, a place that was supposed to provide a sense. The forced you and your family to leave your homes and forced you to move to a pagan land where you’re now regularly confronted with idol worship and heathen practices. What kind of conclusion would you draw from this situation? For many Jews, it caused them to ask the question “Where is God?” Some of them may have gone so far as to think that their God had been defeated by the Babylonian gods. But in such an historical moment, one can understand why there would be a general sense of hopelessness, of spiritual instability. The Psalmist explains their lament: “For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; And they that wasted us required of us mirth, Saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song In a strange land?” Now for us modern Christians, we have the benefit of hindsight in our interpretation of Israel’s history. We can understand that this Exile was God’s punishment of Israel’s infidelity to their covenantal obligations in the form of idolatry, ritualism, and injustice. The fact is that in the midst of this punishment, God was working to bring about Israel’s ultimate restoration, ultimately setting the stage for the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In Isaiah 55, our Old Testament reading for this morning, the prophet receives a glimpse into this future even while in the midst of exile, receiving a divine invitation that he extends not just to Israel, but the whole world. What we see is that we have been invited to a great feast by God and that, ultimately, we actively receive his Word which does not leave us unchanged.

Now the term “Word of God” is used quite often, but what does it mean? For some people, the Word of God means the Bible but I think it is too limiting a definition of the Word. In fact, Scripture tells us what the Word is: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” The Word is not so much a book as it is a person--the Second Person of the Trinity, the agent of Creation, the Wisdom of God, “in whom all things live and move and have their being.” And the beautiful part about the Christian story is that the Word is not a person who stands far off from us, but comes near to us, nearer to us than we are to ourselves. He makes himself present explicity through two main ways: the first is the Sacrament of the Altar, the Holy Communion, where we receive the Word and second by the proclamation of the Church, beginning with the Sacred Scripture and flowing into the life and mission of the Church as it proclaims the Gospel through the preaching of the Word and lives that carry the Word out into the world. So when we talk about the Word, we’re talking about the Person of Jesus Christ who is made present to us in the Holy Eucharist and the proclamation of the Gospel.

The Gospel message that we proclaim is fundamentally an invitation to a Feast: “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, And he that hath no money; Come ye, buy, and eat; Yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price...Hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, And let your soul delight itself in fatness.” The Scriptures are replete with the image of feasting. We can think of the Feast of Passover in Exodus where the Israelites feasted in anticipation of God’s liberation of them from slavery in Egypt. We can also think of the eschatological feast of the Supper of the Lamb, an eternal feast highlighting the intimate unity we will share with God and each other. The beautiful thing is that the feast we’re invited to includes everyone, Jew and Gentile, male and female, rich and poor, and everyone alike: “Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, And nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee.” We can think of the Parable of the Great Banquet where the host invites people from far and wide because he’s just so excited about having a feast; God invites us to his great feast out of his sheer goodness. For us, the feast we’re invited to is the Eucharist, the feast at the heart of the Church. It’s a new Passover because in it, we are delivered from spiritual bondage but “Christ our Passover who has been sacrificed for us.” The Feast is not just something that he throws for us, the food we are given is Christ himself. He’s not a high priest who sacrifices an animal, but he offers himself. Just like a mother pelican often feeds its chicks with its own flesh, so Christ gives us himself to be our manna from heaven so that we “might be partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). We feast now as a window into our great hope: “That we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.”

Here’s a question though: why a meal? Why did God decide to give food as a chief sacrament to his Church food? Why does he invite us to eat together and why does he promise us a perpetual feast? Because by eating, we are reminded on our dependence, humbling us after we pridefully ate the fruit in the Fall. But also because eating is a recognition of love: sharing a meal with someone is a wonderfully intimate experience where you invite them to share life with you. And to think, God does that to us. In fact, from one angle, we might write eating off as a purely biological necessity that we have to do; from a Christian perspective, we can say that the very idea of eating points us to Jesus himself.

And the beautiful thing is that the cost of this meal is free because it is a gift. Gifts are unique from other modes of giving because they are not compelled nor are they subject to a kind of market logic. I don’t give my landlord his rent money every month; I exchange the money for the ability to live in his house. Yes, it’s a mutually beneficial transaction, but at the end of the day, I need a place to live and he needs income from his ownership stake in the property. Gift giving is motivated by something entirely other from this. In the divine economy, God’s activities in relation to us are always gift: God didn’t have to create us and he didn’t have to redeem us. But he did and we receive the great gift of redemption through Baptism where our primary role is to receive: “Come unto the waters!” The thing about gift-giving is that should come with a kind of reciprocity. We just celebrated Caroline’s birthday on Friday and the boys and I got her gifts that we know she’ll appreciate. Those gifts will take on a special significance not just because she enjoys them; they’ll be special because we gave them to her. And in response, Caroline will (hopefully) get us good gifts at our birthdays. It’s not a tit-for-tat ledger where we have to spend the exact same dollar amount; but, by exchanging gifts we signal our love and continued relationship. And so when God gives us not just the gift of our existence but our redemption which was brought with so precious a price as the Blood of our Lord, it is only fitting that we would respond by giving him a gift in return and so we “offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls, and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice.” It’s not a sacrifice we make because we hope it might make God love us, it’s a sacrifice we make because he already loves us and we love him. This is why we’re invited to the Great Feast.

The Word is the Person at the very heart of reality. He is the Alpha and Omega, he is all in all, working in all things. Isaiah uses an analogy of water from rain and snow which goes forth from the sky. Perhaps we don’t always realize it’s raining or maybe we just see it as an annoyance or inconvenience but the rain is never pointless. The rain and snow provide the earth with hydration necessary for it to be fruitful and that fruitfulness is what provides for the sower by giving them seed and bread to those who need food. The Word of God, Jesus Christ, does not return void. He proceeds from the Father and returns to Him as the obedient One, he returns with all of us, making us adopted children of the Father. What that means is that just as the water is always bringing about fruitfulness, so the Son is always working in us—he works in us every time at the altar, he works in us every time we encounter the Word through the Scriptures and the proclamation of the Gospel. The Word is working in us right now: calling us, drawing us, instructing us, re-forming us: we’re the lame man to whom Jesus says “Get up and walk.” He’s not going to leave us as he finds us.

The fact that God is at work right now is a call for us to accept that invitation with our whole heart, with all that we are. “Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts: And let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him.” Now is the time to accept the invitation. We can think about the parable of the Great Banquet from Luke 14: the master throwing a feast invites an initial group of people. But the first man who is invited can’t come because he bought land. The second man declines because he just bought a new team of oxen. And a third decided to skip because he just got married. In each case, they allowed their preoccupation with lesser things to miss what matters most. And so the master tells his servants, “None of those men which were bidden shall taste of may supper.” This highlights the point that we live in a time of waiting, a time of divine forbearance and mercy. Nevertheless, “God will come to judge the quick and the dead.” This is the time of preparation in which we “study for the final exam,” getting ready knowing that his return is imminent and so now is the time that we must cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light in the time of this mortal life. We have to “keep our hands on the Gospel plow.” This begins with a simple acceptance to the invitation to the banquet, an acceptance the should model the response of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the Angel Gabriel: “Let it be done to me according to thy will.” This is what we call active reception: it is saying yes to God and participating with him. The initial invitation is simple enough, “Come to the waters.” But as we push forward, that yes becomes more and more expansive, including every area of life so that we “pick up” our “crosses and follow him.

The point is that it’s now or never. The choice must be made immediately and constantly; every now is a time to say yes to God to accept his invitation, to receive the Word of God as it implants itself in our souls. His Word will not return void.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.