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A proclamation of salvation

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Isaiah 43:18-19, 21-22, 24b-25. (Lectionary 080, Feb. 19)

This reading is from Isaiah’s Book of Consolation, chapters 40 to 55, written during the Israelites’ time of exile by one or more of the spiritual descendants of the eighth-century B.C. Isaiah of Jerusalem. These prophetic poems seem to have been intended to provide hope and encouragement to the Israelites as God prepared for their return to the land that had been theirs.

Our reading for this Sunday is one of only five or six readings from the whole Old Testament that are used more than once in the three-year Sunday cycle. The verses that make up the first half of this Sunday’s reading are used in the first reading for the Fifth Sunday of Lent in Year C.

As our text has been condensed for use in the Lectionary, it falls into two parts. The first part calls the Israelites to look forward to new wonders of deliverance from the Lord. There is no need to look back to the exodus from Egypt as the great intervention of God on behalf of His people. God is getting ready to do something new and better. Just as God brought the Israelites through the waters of the Red Sea on dry land, so God will bring them back home through the desert that will be fed by gushing rivers. (The words "The people I formed for myself ... announce my praise" do not seem to form a grammatically complete sentence. There seems to have been some omission or oversight when the text was edited for the Sunday liturgy.)

The second part of our text voices God’s reproaches against His people. They have not honored God or taken pleasure in Him or called upon Him. Instead, they have offended Him by their sinfulness. Yet on His own initiative, God will forgive their sins. God and no one else will wipe away their iniquities.

The New American Bible entitles chapters 43 and 44 of Isaiah "Promises of Redemption and Restoration." What we have here is a proclamation of salvation on God’s part, an announcement that God’s care for His people is not just a matter of the past but something that still continues in the present. God will love His people even though their sinfulness has made them unworthy of His love. God’s salvation of His people involves ongoing renewal, a newness that is never exhausted.

This reading from Isaiah is intended to serve as an overture, a lead-in to this Sunday’s Gospel (Mark 2:1-12). There we see Jesus involving himself with the same three basic elements that we found in our first reading: salvation or rescue, the forgiveness of sin and newness.

Jesus starts with the most important thing: He forgives the man’s sins. This approach teaches the spectators (and us) that the man’s relationship with God is far more significant than anything else. It is only as a kind of afterthought, when He sees the skepticism of the scribes, that Jesus frees the man from his physical burdens and enables him to walk once more. The crowd perceives the newness of what is going on here as they acknowledge, "We have never seen anything like this."

In rescuing the man from sin and sickness, in dealing with him in a new way that people had never experienced before, Jesus is fulfilling once again the promises that God made through Isaiah to the Israelites in Babylon. God had kept His word once already in bringing the people safely back out of their exile, but that first fulfillment of His promises was only the beginning. God likes to do new things for those He loves. Our Gospel reading shows the power of God at work in a new way in Jesus, yet in a way that reflects what God had promised to His people six centuries earlier.

Another aspect of these two readings that needs to be highlighted is the gratuity of God’s interventions. God does not rescue the Israelites from their Babylonian exile because they are good and faithful people. On the contrary, they are a sinful people and God makes no bones about reminding them of their sinfulness. Yet on His own initiative, just because He wants to, God takes away their sins. "It is I, I who wipe out, for my own sake, your offenses."

It’s the same with Jesus in the Gospel reading. The paralytic is not some kind of hidden saint who has been misjudged all this time. The paralytic is a sinner who doesn’t deserve Jesus’ attention at all. But Jesus forgives him anyway and does away with his physical illness yet besides.

God likes to do new things for His people, surprising things, things beyond what people expect. But certain things about God are always the same, and one of those unchanging qualities of God is the generosity of His mercy

For Reflection and Discussion.

How have I experienced newness from God in my life?

From what situations of exile has God freed me?