B Cycle – 1^st Sunday of Advent 23

Is. 63:16b-17, 19b, 64:2-7

As we enter the season of Advent, we are invited to prepare ourselves to encounter Christ.  We are to celebrate and welcome the divine God becoming human so that we would be transformed into the divine.  Yet when you think about it, the people who encountered Jesus during His lifetime had problems with Jesus.  The promised messiah came in an unexpected way. He came to earth in obscurity, unrecognizable, and extremely vulnerable.  He came as a newborn infant, dependent upon His mother and father for everything from food to having His diaper changed. 

Today we marvel at that child lying in a manger. We ooh and awe, take our children to the manger and tell them that baby in that crib is Jesus. Yet that baby was then and is today God incarnate.  Powerful enough to make the storm winds stop blowing, raise the dead, change water into wine, heal the sick, give sight to the blind and forgive sin.   

What is your image of God? Does anything we do during Advent change what you already believe or how you relate to Christ?  It should because our Advent experience should be one of seeking to encounter Christ.  But we seem to marvel at the externals but none of it changes us.  It is as if our hearts are unaffected by what we do because we are trying to have God pleased with us.    The problem is we feel unworthy of God’s grace? 

Our image of God makes us strive to please Him, appease Him, and strive to avoid His wrath.  In today’s first reading, the prophet Isaiah is speaking about us when he says, “why do you let us harden our hearts.” It is not a hardening that repels God from us. No, it is a hardening of our hearts which does not allow Jesus to touch our inner most selves. Those places where our sin and doubts reside.  It is where our weaknesses, our brokenness and the barriers which keeps God away from our hearts. We are like the woman at the well who would rather talk theology than allow Jesus to go where we need Him to go. 

 Isiah is speaking words given to him by God to challenge and motivate all who want what God promised to open themselves up to receive the graces of God.  So, when Isaiah says, “you are angry and we are sinful; we are like unclean people, all our good deeds are like polluted rags, we have withered like leaves and our guilt carries us away like the wind.” He is speaking to us, who believe we are doing what God desires. 

That prevents us from even allowing those words to penetrate us.  We inwardly say that certainly does not describe me.  But it is us. We all fail to do what Isaiah says we should be doing and that is to “…rouse (ourselves) to cling to (Christ).”  It is by understanding Jesus is the source of our holiness.  Allowing Him into those places we have built barriers around need to be opened for us to become more than believes.  It is in inviting Jesus into our lives which allows us to move past our feelings of unworthiness and to receive God’s mercy.  We are making the same mistake the Pharisees made and that is to depend on our own willpower, strictly adhering to rituals and laws to define our holiness.  Yet even as we hide behind the law we still wonder if we are doing enough because we have never experienced God’s mercy. 

The answer to us being confident in God’s mercy is to invite Christ into our hearts.  Invite Jesus into our lives realizing we do not have to clean up our lives before Jesus will come to us.  We must become like those who went to Jesus for healing and allow Him to touch our sin. It is the touch of Jesus that frees us from the pollution of sin. It is Jesus who cleanses our hearts.  We can never remove the pollution of sin by our external efforts.  Those things we do which make us feel holy.

We live our faith like hamsters, running in place inside a wheel, striving hard to attain holiness and yet we realize we have gone nowhere.  We are left feeling more is required for us to be welcomed by God.  God is telling us nothing is required but to stand in front of Jesus and say I embrace why you came to earth – the forgiveness of my sin and to give me life. 

We need to do exactly what Isaiah said to us seven hundred years before Christ was born and that is to allow the Holy Spirit to mold us for, we are the clay, and He is the potter.  It is only by going to Jesus that we are changed, healed, and transformed. 

Whatever it is we need Jesus is the answer.  If the wounds of our past were because we were abused, abandonment, neglected, unloved, rejected, lived in poverty or was the target of taunts – Jesus can change all of that in an instant. If our wounds were because of physical deformities, illnesses, or speech impediments, blindness or just a lack of self-worth Jesus can change that in an instant. Jesus is waiting for you to approach Him, but He is knocking on the doors of our hearts (Rev.3:20) inviting us to open ourselves to His touch.  That is the Jesus who came to earth. He is the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings the Messiah.