The Lord builds up Jerusalem and brings back Israel's exiles, heals the broken-hearted and binds up all their wounds. So today's psalm. The first reading is very similar, speaking of healing and restoration, a new moment of security and plenty. We can imagine Jerusalem, like a city destroyed by warfare, and the Lord moving around in the streets of that city, finding the sick and needy, the starving and the abandoned.
One thing noted in the first reading that is not mentioned in the psalm is that it is the Lord who has inflicted on his people the suffering from which he is now rescuing them! He is, Isaiah says, their teacher, showing the way to the people, and he is their doctor, healing the bruises his blows have left.
It raises questions about the meaning of suffering and why evil things come on people. 'I must have done something really bad to have ended up like this', a sick cousin said to me one time. The proposal from Isaiah today is that we see a pedagogical purpose in suffering, it is not simply a punishment for sin. There are things we must learn, virtues to be acquired, ways of seeing to be corrected, realities to be appreciated. And it seems that often, perhaps always, it is only through suffering that human beings learn and acquire and correct and appreciate.
The gospel reading continues along this line but adds to it in significant ways. Here Jesus is moving around the towns and villages, doing what the first reading and the psalm speak about. He heals and he teaches, is moved with compassion, sees the devastated spiritual landscape in which the people are wandering, harassed and dejected.
One change from what we have seen already is that Jesus delegates the work of healing and teaching to the twelve disciples. They have been with him, being taught and healed themselves, and now they are ready to participate in the gathering of the harvest. He gives them extraordinary powers, to cure illness and cast out demons, to cleanse lepers and even raise the dead. the works which God does among the people are to be undertaken by the people themselves or at least by those called from among them to serve the Lord's work on their behalf.
Another significant change is that the Lord, the Messiah, will take on himself the sufferings of his people, entering into them in a way not seen before. It is more for Lent and Easter than for Advent and Christmas, this point about a new participation of the Lord in the sufferings of his people. It is something yet to be revealed about how the kingdom of heaven, that reign of healing and renewal, is finally established. But it is important to recall it already, as we gaze across the devastated landscape of the world in December 2021.
Today's opening prayer says that the Son comes to free the human race from its ancient enslavement, and to offer us true freedom. May we be ready to receive the gifts he brings, be ready to learn and suffer with him, be ready for the service of each other which he wishes to delegate to us.
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