Wednesday of the First Week of Advent 2024

Why doesn’t everyone see the truth of God’s love for humanity? Why are so many simply unable to know what God has in store for them. The reading of Isaiah talks about a great feast that God will provide for all humanity. This is our end, this is why we were made: to feast with God in his kingdom. But until we arrive there, we are held back. There is a “veil that veils all peoples, the web that is woven over all the nations.” The sufferings of this life, the daily reminders of sin and death among us, the injustices we experience—all of this keeps us from clinging to the God who simply wants to feast with us. We find it so hard to see past this veil of pain, of sin, of death. If anyone were to tell us, “Don’t worry! It’s all in God’s providence!” we would dismiss him as naïve, simplistic, unaware of what we actually go through. So again, we have to ask: why can’t we see and cling to the great love God has for us? And further, if we are an Order of Preachers, how do we communicate this love in a way that people will accept?

The saint we commemorate today, John of Damascus, points us in the right direction. He is best known for defending the Church’s use of icons and images. He taught that, by becoming incarnate in our mortal flesh, Christ makes us see the invisible God through his humanity. And so, now in the Church, we can really, truly know and love God through our material images, be they icons, statues, paintings, etc.. Now this all sounds great, but how does this help us deal with the veil that blinds us to the feast God call us to?

Christ uses us as images of his redeeming love in the world. In our Gospel, Christ’s heart “is moved with pity for the crowd,” the crowd that has followed him, hungry and thirsty and tired as they were. But his pity doesn’t stay inside him. It actually impacts the crowd, and not without the help of his disciples. They are the ones entrusted with distributing the feast. They are the ones supposed to feed the crowd. In so doing, they image and make present the pity of Christ’s heart for the crowd. The disciples extend Christ’s compassion to the crowd. They are images that make real and effective what the love they signify.

Imperfect as we are, we are called to do the same, especially as preachers. Our words, our preaching, and our lives of ministry are supposed to be sacred images of Christ’s pity and mercy in the world. The veil that Isaiah talks about won’t taken away from the world, unless we allow ourselves to become images of that love. As our brother, Thomas Aquinas, often writes, God delights in using secondary causes. God doesn’t remove the veil by some abstract decree from above. He condescends, and he continues to condescend through us. As we contemplate Christ’s coming this Advent, we should remember that he continues to come and visit his people through us. The world needs us to be authentic images of Christ.