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Commentary on Isaiah 42:1-7

Today we have the first of the four Songs of the Servant of Yahweh from Isaiah. Together, they describe the finest qualities of Israel and her great leaders. Today’s song describes a ‘chosen one’ like Moses, David, and all Israel. As the Servant, he fulfils the role of Davidic king and prophet. It is a beautiful description of a mysterious servant of God which the Church has long realised applies so aptly to Jesus.

The passage is taken from the ‘Book of Consolation’, or Second Isaiah (chaps 40-55). It speaks of Israel as a “Servant of Yahweh”, chosen or set apart, to act as God’s witness before the nations. But the four Songs of the Servant of Yahweh (42:1-9; 49:1-6; 50:4-11; 52:13—53:12) present a mysterious ‘servant’ who in some ways is like the ‘servant-Israel’ of the other passages. In today’s passage, however, he is distinguished from the servant-Israel, and shown to have other qualities which show him as a particular individual.

Called by Yahweh while still in his mother’s womb, ‘formed’ by him, filled with his spirit, the servant is a “covenant” (i.e. disciple). Yahweh has opened his ears, so that, by establishing justice on earth, he may instruct mankind, and sort them and judge them by his word. He performs his task gently and without display, even appearing to fail in it. He accepts outrage and contempt and does not succumb because Yahweh sustains him.

Yahweh is speaking and says, “Here is my servant”. He designates and consecrates the Servant. In the royal terminology of the ancient Near East, “servant” could mean something like ‘trusted envoy’ or ‘confidential representative’.

Jesus, too, called himself a ‘servant’:

For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)

He gave a dramatic example when he knelt down and washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper (John 13:1-17).

He will not only ‘gather’ Israel, but he will be the light to the nations everywhere. The New Testament sees Jesus as this servant—in his person the attributes of the King-Messiah, Son of David, are united with those of the suffering servant (see also Luke 4:17-21).

In the previous chapter, King Cyrus of Persia had been introduced as delivering Israel from captivity in Babylon, but the Servant would deliver the whole world from the prison of sin.

The passage speaks of gentleness and non-violence, a message so necessary for our time. He is gentle, but not weak or passive:

He does not cry out or shout aloud…

He is a bringer of harmony and peace, not of noise and turmoil:

…a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench…

He does not exploit the weak in a false show of power, but empowers through bringing healing and wholeness to the frail and the weak. This is just what Jesus did in his mission to the people.

He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth,
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.

This passage is quoted by Matthew in his Gospel (Matt 12:18-21). In his gentleness and compassion, there is no weakness. There is a great inner strength, but a total rejection of violence.

As well that passage says:

…the coastlands wait for his teaching…

This indicates the lands of the Mediterranean and, by implication, the pagan lands lying beyond Israel. The Servant has a mission to all, not just to some.

Then comes the special call made by Yahweh to the Servant:

I have called you in righteousness…

This is similar to the call made earlier to King Cyrus, who will deliver the Jews from their Babylonian exile and allow them to return home. The reading continues:

I have taken you by the hand and kept you…

In Hebrew, the same term for “kept” is also translated as ‘formed’, and is used in the creation story of Genesis to describe Yahweh’s ‘forming’ or ‘modelling’ the body of the first man. Jesus, of course, is the New Adam.

I have given you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations…

Jesus as Messiah will inaugurate the New Covenant by his suffering and death, a covenant now embracing peoples everywhere. We will see that more clearly when we read more of the Suffering Servant during Holy Week.

This Servant has been called by God, the creator of all things, to do God’s work and carry out his will. He will be “a light to the nations” and will:

…open the eyes that are blind…bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness…

Originally this referred to release from the prison of the Babylonian exile, but it also indicates the hope of liberation for every person from all spiritual and moral bondage.

As we begin Holy Week, we are reminded that this work of God’s servant, which we also are, has to go on through us. We are not here this week just to be spectators, even grateful spectators. We are to be part of the work which the Paschal Mystery inaugurated. We, too, are to be servants, ready, if necessary, to suffer as Jesus did for the sake of our brothers and sisters.

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Commentary on John 11:45-57

We are now on the threshold of Holy Week and today’s Gospel sets the stage for the coming events. The passage is again full of Johannine irony, where people make statements with a meaning far beyond what they intend to say.

The raising of Lazarus had led many to believe in Jesus, but others were alarmed. They went off to the chief priests and asked what was being done to stop this man in his tracks. Their report was serious enough to warrant calling the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of the Jews, into session:

What are we to do? This man is performing many signs.

Far from seeing the great significance of the “signs”, they go into a panic:

If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.

Of course, what they feared and wanted to stop is exactly what happened. Jesus did go “on like this” and the Temple and the nation were destroyed.

Caiaphas, the high priest, moves to quell their fears and then goes on to make his own unwitting prophecy. A gift of prophecy, sometimes unconscious, was attributed to the high priest. He says:

You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.

Caiaphas is saying that it is better to get rid of Jesus, than put the whole nation in jeopardy. In fact, in a very different way, Jesus did die for his own people, and John comments that Jesus died not only for the Jewish people, but for people everywhere. And, it was not for the political preservation of a nation, but for the giving of new life to a people where all conventional divisions became irrelevant.

The end for Jesus is coming close, so he goes into hiding until the time is right. Again he goes to Ephraim, a place thought to be about 20 km northeast of Jerusalem, where mountains descend into the Jordan valley. It was a remote desert area where Jesus was relatively safe.

As the Passover approaches, people are on the watch for Jesus to appear. Instructions have been given out that any sightings of Jesus were to be reported so that the authorities could arrest him.

Again there is another ironic question:

What do you think? Surely he will not come to the festival, will he?

Little did they know that Jesus would be the central character of this Passover and make it the most famous Passover in history. We are now ready to enter the great finale of Holy Week.

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Commentary on Ezekiel 37:21-28

About today’s First Reading, the St Joseph Weekday Missal says:

“The union of all tribes is a frequent element in messianic prophecy. God is to unite the nation in a new covenant in which there are five essential elements:

• Yahweh, its God;
• Israel, his people;
• Life, ‘on the land where their fathers lived’;
• ‘My sanctuary among them’, as a sign of the presence of the Lord and law;
• David, as the one shepherd over them.”

The prophet foresees a time when the two divided kingdoms of the Jews (Israel or Ephraim and Judah, the Northern and Southern kingdoms) will be united forever into one, and when all those living abroad who belong to Israel will come back. This will be a feature of the Messianic age.

The reading says:

I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone and will gather them from every quarter and bring them to their own land.

This sentence is echoed in the Gospel when John says about the unwitting prophecy of the high priest Caiaphas:

…he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God. (John 11:51-52)

These will then give up all their sinful ways and all forms of idolatry and abominations, with which they had been plagued for so many generations, and will be cleansed by God.

My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd.

The coming Messianic ruler is called David because he will be a descendant of David and will achieve for Israel what David had—except more fully. He is likened to a shepherd, who cares for his flock, echoing where Yahweh says he will be the “shepherd of my sheep” (Ezek 34:14). We recognise Jesus in this ‘Messianic David’, and later Jesus will also call himself the Good Shepherd, protecting his own and looking for those who are lost.

The passage continues:

I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them, and I will…set my sanctuary among them forevermore.

The phrase “everlasting (or eternal) covenant” occurs 16 times in the Old Testament, referring to that made with Noah, with Abraham, with David, and a ‘new covenant’ made in Jeremiah (32:40).

The covenant formula, a pledge of mutual commitment, is once again repeated:

…I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

It is through Jesus, through the covenant signed by his blood on the cross, that the New Covenant will be ratified and is still in force. With one big difference—it extends now, not to one people or race, but to the whole world:

Then the nations shall know that I the Lord sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary is among them forevermore.

And that ‘sanctuary’ for us is the ongoing and visible presence of the Risen Lord, no longer identified with a building, but in his People, who are now his Body:

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (1 Cor 3:16)

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? (1 Cor 6:19)

The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.
(1 Cor 10:16-17)

And indeed, as today’s Gospel ends, it points to the coming Passover feast when the sacramental celebration of Jesus’ Pasch will occur—that celebration by which we commemorate and make present the inauguration of the New Covenant on Calvary.

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Commentary on John 10:31-42

Once again Jesus’ enemies want to stone him because they continue to accuse him of blasphemy:

…you, though only a human, are making yourself God.

It is clear they have no doubt about the meaning of his words. Jesus points to the Scriptures, which has God saying of some people, “You are gods”. Jesus is here referring to the people called ‘judges’ in Israel. Since they were judges of their people, taking on themselves something which belongs only to God, they were called “gods” (see Deut 1:17; Exod 21:6; Ps 82:6).

If people inspired by the word from God could be called ‘gods’, can Jesus whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world blaspheme because he says:

I am God’s Son?

And, if they will not accept a verbal claim, Jesus appeals to what he has been doing:

…even though you do not believe me, believe the works…

To anyone with an open mind, it is clear that God is working in Jesus:

…you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.

Again, they tried to seize him, but he escaped from their power. His time had not yet come, and that time would not be decided by them.

On the other hand, while Jesus was being attacked by the leaders of the Jews, many of the ordinary people continued to seek him out. Jesus had gone back across the Jordan (a safer place) to the spot where John the Baptist had baptised and given such strong testimony about Jesus. Many people came looking for him there.

The people could see, as the Pharisees could not, a clear distinction between Jesus and John:

John performed no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true. And many believed in him there.

There are many who reject Christ and his message today, but let us pray that we may have open minds to believe the many signs by which God reveals his love to us each day.

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Commentary on Jeremiah 20:10-13

Jeremiah the prophet, God’s spokesman, is attacked and denounced on all sides by his own people.

“Terror on every side!” is the mocking call of Jeremiah’s critics, satirising his constantly gloomy predictions. “Let us denounce him!”—in the way that he constantly denounces the behaviour of others.

Even his friends abandon him.

All my close friends
are watching for me to stumble.

They are waiting for him to make some fatal mistake:

Perhaps he can be enticed,
and we can prevail against him
and take our revenge on him.

Jesus was treated in exactly the same way by Pharisees and scribes constantly trying to catch him out in violation of the Law. They ‘plant’ a disabled man in a synagogue on a Sabbath day to see if he will heal him. They ask him if it is right or not to give taxes to Caesar—where either a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer would be equally incriminating.

But Jeremiah has confidence in his God and his attackers will not prevail:

But the Lord is with me…my persecutors will stumble,
and they will not prevail.

For his God is a God of justice and truth, a God who is on the side of the needy:

Sing to the Lord;
praise the Lord!
For he has delivered the life of the needy
from the hands of evildoers.

The needy one, ebion, or the poor, anaw, is used in a religious sense: ill-treated by people, but confident in God, looking to Yahweh for support. By Jeremiah’s time, the term ‘poor’ and ‘needy’ had become virtually synonymous with ‘righteous’, someone whose total trust and dependence is on God.

Ultimately, Jeremiah knows, truth and justice will prevail no matter what some people try to do. It is a belief that we need to remember ourselves. It is a belief we see realised in Jesus. They could kill his body, but not his Spirit.

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Commentary on John 8:51-59

Jesus continues to challenge the Jews about his identity, and they continue to misunderstand the real meaning of what he says.

Very truly, I tell you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.

This they can only understand in a literal sense.

But they do see the implication of the words that Jesus is claiming to be more than Abraham or any of the prophets. And they ask:

Who do you claim to be?

This was the same question they asked of John the Baptist (John 1:22), who gave a very different answer.

Jesus makes it perfectly clear to them by talking of his “Father” and then saying that the Father is the one they call “our God”. But he continues by saying that they do not know the Father, although they may think they do. And they do not know the Father because they do not know Jesus. Jesus, however, knows him and keeps his word. Then comes the supreme provocation:

Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad.

This could be a reference to the joy following the unexpected birth of Isaac, when the promise was made to Abraham that his seed would be:

…as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore… (Gen 22:17)

But this angered the Pharisees and they retorted:

You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?

Jesus then makes the ultimate claim:

Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.

Again we have Jesus using the term “I AM” of himself. He unequivocally identifies himself with Yahweh. The Pharisees are horrified by what they regard as terrible blasphemy. The verb “was” in the passage is, in some translations, expressed as ‘came to be’, and is used for all that is created, while ‘I AM’ is used only of the Word, co-eternal with the Father-God.

The Pharisees then:

…picked up stones to throw at him…

But they were not able actually to carry out their plan to kill him because his “time” had not yet come. Then come words of prophetic significance:

Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple…

It is a striking summary of Jesus’ role.

Jesus “hid himself” in his humanity. The Godhead in Jesus, which he has just spoken about, was largely concealed (except to those with the eyes of faith). St Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises speaks of the divinity being hidden during the terrible hours of the Passion. St Paul in his Letter to the Philippians speaks of Jesus “emptying” himself and taking the form of a slave.

And “he went out of the Temple”—when Jesus died on the cross, the veil guarding the Holy of Holies in the Temple split open, revealing the sacred inner sanctuary to the world. God was no longer there; he had left the Temple. And he now dwells in a new Temple, no longer a building, but a people, the Church, the Body of the Risen Christ.

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Commentary on Genesis 17:3-9

At the beginning of chapter 17 of Genesis, we are told that Yahweh appeared to Abram, now 99 years old, and identified himself as: “I am El Shaddai” (Gen 17:1). In Hebrew, El Shaddai was an ancient divine name of the patriarchal period, preserved mainly in the ‘Priestly’ tradition, and rarely used outside the Pentateuch (except in Job). The usual translation of El Shaddai as ‘Almighty God’ is inaccurate, as ‘Mountain God’ is the more probable meaning. Yahweh (El Shaddai) now promises to make a covenant with Abram, and to pledge him a long line of descendants. Abram bows down in deep adoration.

Abram is to become the father of many nations, and because of that, his name is to be changed from Abram to Abraham. We need to remember that, for the ancients, a name did not merely indicate a person or thing; rather, it made a thing what it was, and a change of name meant a change of destiny. Abram and Abraham are in fact just two dialectical forms of the same name whose meaning is ‘he is great by reason of his father, he is of noble descent’. Another variant is Abiram (Num 16:1; 1 Kings 16:34). The additional ‘ha’ in the form Abraham is explained by folk etymology as coming from ab-hamon goyim, i.e. “father of a host of nations”.

On his side, God makes a solemn commitment to Abraham, and to all his descendants in perpetuity, to be their God.

I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you.

There will indeed be a long line of kings—and a very mixed bunch they are. But no matter how corrupt the kings could be, the promises made to Abraham continued to be fulfilled. Paul, writing to the Romans, will speak of Abraham’s faith in God’s promise which, by that time, had been so clearly fulfilled.

It is a pledge made forever:

I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

Yahweh further promises to give them the whole land of Canaan to own in perpetuity. This is a pledge which Christians, unlike some Jews, would now read in a less than literal way.

Finally, Abraham and his descendants are to ratify this covenant, and on their part, are to keep the covenant by their total allegiance to their one and only God.

Abraham, as the Gospel indicates, is regarded as the father of all God’s people. As Matthew’s genealogy indicates, he is the ancestor of Jesus, and in Jesus we find the complete fulfilment of the promises made long ago. We read in today’s Gospel:

Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad. (John 8:56)

The covenant made between Abraham and God is both sealed and renewed in Jesus Christ. And through Jesus, people everywhere become, in a special way, children of God. Let us rejoice in having God as our Father and Jesus as our Brother. We do so by the way we live our lives.

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Commentary on John 8:31-42

Contentious dialogue between Jesus and the Jews continues in today’s Gospel reading. There are some sayings here which we would do well to reflect on deeply.

If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.

The Pharisees take umbrage at that statement. As descendants of Abraham, they were never slaves to anyone. But in fact, in the long history of their people, the Jews were almost continuously enslaved by invading powers. However, the slavery Jesus speaks about is the slavery of sin.

In responding to Jesus’ words, how many of us who want to be disciples of Christ have truly made his word our ‘home’? How many of us have to admit that we are not really very familiar with Jesus’ word in the New Testament? Yet we cannot truly follow him unless we are steeped in that word.

As well, how many of us really believe that the truth about life, communicated to us through Jesus, makes us genuinely free? How many of us experience our commitment to Christianity as a liberation? How many have left the Church because they felt suffocated and wanted to be free?

What freedom were they looking for? For many, being a Christian is sacrificing freedom in exchange for a promise of a future existence of pure happiness. We can say with confidence that, if we do not find being a Christian a liberating experience here and now, we do not really understand the true nature of our Christian faith. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says:

If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God, and now I am here. I did not come on my own, but he sent me.

To know Jesus, to love Jesus and to follow Jesus is the way to God, and it is in God, and only in God, that we will find true happiness, freedom and peace. But the only way to know the truth of that statement is to experience it personally.

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Commentary on Daniel 3:14-20,24-25,28

Today’s First Reading helps us to see that our lives find their centre in God; all else takes second place. The verses come from a different section of a passage we already saw on Tuesday of the 3rd week in Lent.

King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had built a golden statue and commanded all his subjects to bow down in adoration before it as a test of loyalty (this is not unlike the requirement that early Christians had to bow down before an image of the Roman emperor as a sign of abandoning their faith in Christ as Lord). Three young Jewish men in the service of the royal court, and who were particular favourites of the king for their outstanding qualities, refuse to worship the statue. They prefer death rather than turn their back on their God.

In his anger, the king threatens to have them thrown into a white-hot furnace from which no god will save them. The young men calmly reply that either their God will save them, because he can, or, even if he does not, they will still remain steadfast in their trust of God. The king, now even more angry, has them thrown into a furnace which has been made seven times hotter.

Later, when he makes enquiries, the king finds that the three young men, now in the company of a fourth (recognized by the king as an angel), are walking around unscathed in the fire. The pagan king is deeply moved by what he sees. First, he is filled with admiration for the God that delivered them from certain death and, second, he deeply respects the young men who disobeyed him and were ready to sacrifice their lives, rather than turn their back on their God. He exclaims:

Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants who trusted in him.

Today’s reading is linked with the Gospel in which Jesus speaks of those who are truly descendants of Abraham. If those attacking him were true descendants, then they would recognise Jesus as truly the Son of God. As it is, they show they are not true descendants.

Reflecting on the First Reading I might ask: What are the idols in my life? Is there anything in my life which I would find very difficult to sacrifice if God asked me to give it up? Is there any thing or any person in my life which comes between God and me?

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Commentary on John 8:21-30

Listening to Jesus, the Pharisees must have thought he was speaking in riddles. This was largely due to their own preconceived ideas about him. They take every statement he makes literally (they are the original Fundamentalists) and miss the symbolism. Basically, their problem is, as Jesus points out, that they:

…are from below…you are from this world, I am not from this world.

John uses the word ‘world’ in two senses. In one meaning, he simply is referring to the world that God created with all its variety. Later, he will tell his disciples that, if they want to communicate his message effectively, they will have to be fully inserted in that world, like the leaven in the dough. Separating themselves from that world will not do much for the building of the Kingdom on earth.

The second meaning of ‘world’ for John refers to everything around us which cannot be identified with God or Jesus. It is that part of our environment which speaks and acts in a way that is contrary to the Spirit of Jesus and the vision of Jesus for the world. Jesus does not identify himself with that world, nor does he want any of his disciples to identify with it either. Their mission is to change it, to shine his Light on it.

Multiple times in today’s passage Jesus says of himself “I AM”, an expression we saw yesterday and which was used directly of God himself.

When they “have lifted up the Son of Man”, then they will know who Jesus really is, and that everything that Jesus has said and done comes from God himself because, as he will say later:

The Father and I are one. (John 10:30)

“Lifted up” not only refers to Jesus’ being lifted up on the cross, but also includes the glorification of Jesus, his lifting up to sit at the Father’s right hand. For John, the cross is Jesus’ moment of glory, the triumphant climax of his mission. And because of these words, we are told, “many” came to believe in him, but most of the Pharisees were not among them.

This is a time for us also to examine our allegiance to Christ and what he means for us in our lives. Is our following of him truly a healing and liberating experience, not only for ourselves, but for others as well?