Homily: 1st Sunday of Advent 2014 - The Potter and the Clay

Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” begins, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  When the prophet Isaiah was writing to exiled Israel, it was simply, “the worst of times.”  The destruction of Jerusalem, and the Temple, at the hands of the Babylonians was the ultimate calamity for the people of Israel. 

The Kingdom of Israel had already experienced division.  The one Kingdom of David had been divided into a northern Kingdom and the southern kingdom.  The King of the North, not wanting his people to travel south to the Temple, set up his own false temples to false gods, with a false religion, false feast days, and false religious tenets.  Because they had no real religion to support them, they soon fell into immorality and became vulnerable to their enemies.  The northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians in 740 BC. 

Witnessing what happened in the North, Prophets in the South urged God’s people to remain faithful to God.  They had everything they needed to remain faithful: they had the holy city of Jerusalem , home to the true Davidic Kingship and the True Temple, the True Religion was being taught.  Yet, they began to slip.  Prophets like Obadiah, Joel, and Habakkuk warned that the disaster which befell the North would soon befall the South if they did not reform their lives and teach their children to walk in the ways of righteousness.

In the first reading today, Isaiah calls the southerners an “unclean people” their deeds “like polluted rags”, their nation “withered like leaves”.  Just as the prophets had foretold, their wickedness had caused them to grow weak and vulnerable to their enemies.  In 605 BC, the Babylonians captured the South, in 589 Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem culminating with the destruction of the city and the Temple in 587.  Because of their wickedness they were “carried away” by the wind. 

The Jews of the South were carried off, in chains, with no possessions, and marched into Babylon.  They were exiled from their homeland, from their temple; loved ones are separated.  Think of how devastated we were on September 11, 2001, at the loss of life and that our great nation could be attacked. The suffering of Israel was orders of magnitude greater.  Everything had fallen apart.  It was the darkest point in Israel’s history.

Imagine how shaken the Jews must have been.  No doubt, they thought, How could God allow this to happen to his chosen people, his city, his temple.  Had God abandoned them?

The exiled Jews were in anguish, desperate for some sign that God was still there.  Isaiah even verbalizes some of Israel’s frustration: “oh that you would rend the heavens and come down with the mountains quaking before you.”  Why don’t you show us your face, O God.  Why don’t you act?  

Why don’t you do something? 

Who can’t identify with that sentiment.  Who hasn’t felt captive? Who hasn’t felt like everything has gone wrong, God has abandoned me?  Perhaps, watching the nightly news, seeing the violence, the war, the political turmoil, the civil unrest, the grave immorality, wondering when, O Lord will you show yourself?  When will there be peace? 

Perhaps, you are in a very dry period in your prayer life, wondering, when will prayer become sweet again for me?  Even the great saints experienced times of great dryness in their prayer life—when it felt like God had withdrawn.  Sometimes it’s like God has hidden himself, Isaiah verbalizes this in our first reading: he says, “God, you have hidden your face from us.” 

God allowed Israel to be exiled, so that that could recognize the need to be obedient, the need to form their families in faith.  They had rejected the need for worship, the need of the commandments, the need for holy learning; they rejected the need for God, so God allowed them to come to realize how captive they were to sin without Him.

The experience of longing for God is a good thing.  It helps us recognize that without God we are indeed captive.  It helps us to cry out, as we did in the Psalm, “Let us see your face and we shall be saved.”

At the end of the Isaiah reading, we get this beautiful image—an image that we do well to remember for all of the season of Advent, in image we do well to remember whenever God feels distant, or we are going through any sort of trial or difficulty: “Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you are the potter, we are all the work of your hands.”

When we are in anguish, frustrated that God’s face seems hidden, captive by events we cannot control: illness, war, death, Isaiah encourages us to consider ourselves clay to be shaped by the hands of Our Father in heaven.  God will use the hard events of life, to form us into something great. 

God is not distant, he is not absent, even when he seems hidden.  God is intimately involved with humanity.  He wants to be intimately involved with every human soul.  He wants to form us, he wants to shape us. 

Yet, we have to offer ourselves as clay to be formed, by God.  The clay of our hearts must not be hard, unpliant, immalleable.   We must be open to change.  We must be open to becoming more prayerful, more generous, more patient.

This desire for God to shape us, form us, save us, is at the heart of Advent.  Advent is about recognizing our need for a Savior—recognizing that all too often our hearts and lives have been like hard stone, instead of soft clay. 

St. Ireneus said that as long as the clay of our hearts remains supple and moist, the work of the potter is relatively painless.  But if the clay becomes brittle, and hardened, it can break under the work of the potter. 

We look inward at the state of our souls during Advent, to do everything in our power to make our souls pliant to God.  During Advent we look to people like King David, John the Baptist, Mary of Nazareth as people who were open to allowing God to use them, the shape them for his purposes, people of great active watchfulness.  We prepare our hearts In Advent for the celebration of Christ’s coming at Christmas, by doing penance, by going to confession, by setting side time every day for quiet, yet active prayer, spiritual reading, and engaging in acts of service.

As Jesus comes to us in the mystery of the Eucharist at this holy Mass, may we allow him every deeper into our hearts, to prepare our hearts for the celebration of his coming in history at Christmas and majesty at the end of time, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.