Memorial of Saint John of the Cross, Priest and Doctor of the Church
What a shift we have had in Isaiah’s prophecy! We heard about a worldwide banquet in God’s presence, with enemies in the animal kingdom becoming friends. By contrast today: “O worm Jacob, O maggot Israel.” In fairness, the context is: “Fear not, O worm Jacob, O maggot Israel. I will help you, says the Lord.”
Polarized discourse along with an easily offended culture today perhaps shocks us at this language. Indeed, working with young Catholics lacking self-confidence and beating themselves up as sinners I am used to emphasizing being beloved children of their Father by necessity.
Yet, unless we also understand how different we are in kind and not simply degree from God, we will never appreciate the tremendous gift He works! Throughout the Scriptures, we see our insignificance before God. “When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers – what is man that you care for him?” reads Psalm 8. Why would God care about my insignificant thirty, sixty, eighty years? But then, the psalmist says to himself, “Yet you have made [man and woman] little less than a god.”
Similarly, Isaiah tells the worms and maggots that God will make them something powerful: a threshing sledge. This farm implement will not be used to cut crops but instead to raze mountains. A tremendous change that only God can effect!
This is why Jesus can praise John the Baptist as the greatest man who ever lived and state that the weakest among us in His kingdom is greater still. Christ set aside His divine power to assume our wormy condition. Jesus went so far as to bear up the worst of humanity’s sin, violence, and hatred and to overcome in the hidden power of the Cross. Thus, although our talents are meant to be charisms—gifts placed at the service of the Church— we will probably manifest Christ’s power more through our weakness because it is not ourselves that is doing the work. Identify, then, with your cross and become a threshing sledge; take your faith in God the size of a mustard seed and move mountains.
Reflection by Fr. Pachomius Meade, OSB
Posted in Articles for Advent, Daily Reflections