We’re reading in our lectionary from the prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, during the 16th week of the year. Micah lived in the southern kingdom of Judea in the 8th century when Assyrian armies destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and began deporting many of its people to Assyria. 

Archeologists and historians think a good number of people from the northern kingdom immigrated south to Judea at this time and eventually they contributed to its growth. But first, they needed land and houses to live in.  Micah warns Judea’s wealthy class against treating the new immigrants badly. 

Woe to those who plan iniquity…
They covet fields, and seize them;
houses, and they take them;
They cheat an owner of his house,
a man of his inheritance. (Micah 2, 1-6)

The same people whom God led out of Egypt and gave land to freely are gouging the poor immigrants:

O my people, what have I done to you,
or how have I wearied you? Answer me!
For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,
from the place of slavery I released you;

Prophets like Micah called for social justice. They raised up issues that don’t go out of date. We need prophetic voices to raise them up today in a society increasingly anti-immigrant. Housing, immigration, unfair real estate practices?

You have been told what’s good, what the LORD requires of you: Only do justice and love goodness and walk humbly with your God.  (Micah 8:8)

“But you, Bethlehem-Ephrathah,least among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient times.”Micah 5: 1-2.

Matthew’s Gospel (2: 5-6) reports that the chief priests and scribes cite this passage from Micah as a promise that a messiah in the line of David will be born in Bethlehem. The reading is also the first reading for the Feast of the Birth of Mary, September 8, and one of the readings for the common of feasts of Mary.

For this week’s homily please watch the video below.

“Come by yourselves to an out-of-the-way place and rest awhile.”

Last Sunday in Mark’s gospel Jesus sent out his disciples two by two to proclaim his message and cure the sick. Today’s reading describes their return; they’re enthused by what they’ve experienced. It looks like they have done very well, and they’re ready to go out again.

But Jesus tells them, “Come by yourselves and rest awhile.” Now, if you tend to think of Jesus as a hard boss, a relentless driver, remember this gospel. Instead of sending his disciples out again, he tells them to rest awhile–probably the last thing they want to hear, but what they need to do. 

 “Come apart, and rest awhile.” That’s a call for balance in life, a balance of doing and resting, of work and leisure. A hard balance to keep, especially today, I think.

Our world never seems to sleep, our cell phones and computers and video games never stop, our businesses, our work go on day and night, seven days a week. We’re a driven society; we seem to have lost the rhythm of sleep, of meals, of quiet reflection, of prayer, of resting awhile. Even the way we play seems to be over organized and frenetic. We don’t seem to be able to rest awhile. 

Sometimes the business world creates this imbalance. Some people have jobs that are too demanding, non-stop.  Sometimes we ourselves create the imbalance. We want too much, we want to do too much. We don’t want to stop and rest awhile. But we’re not machines; we’re human beings and human beings need to rest awhile. 

We need to remember God’s presence, guiding and sustaining us. We need to hope in God. 

There’s a beautiful poem by the French poet Charles Peguy called “Sleep.” In the poem God talks to someone like us. “Do you think I can’t handle things without you,” God says. Go to sleep. Get some rest.

Here’s some of the poem:

“Human wisdom says  “Don’t put off until tomorrow 
What can be done the very same day.”
But I tell you that he who knows how to put off until tomorrow
Is the most agreeable to God
He who sleeps like a child
Is also he who sleeps like my darling Hope.
And I tell you: Put off until tomorrow
Those worries and those troubles which are gnawing at you 
today
Put off until tomorrow those sobs that choke you
When you see today’s unhappiness.
Those sobs which rise up and strangle you.
Put off until tomorrow those tears which fill your eyes and
your head,
Flooding you, rolling down your cheeks, those tears which
stream down your cheeks.
Because between now and tomorrow, maybe I, your  God, will have
passed by your way.
Human wisdom says: Woe to the one who puts off what he
has to do until tomorrow.
And I say Blessed, blessed is the one who puts off what he
has to do until tomorrow.
Blessed is the one who puts off. That is to say, blessed is the one who 
hopes. And who sleeps.”

The poem’s not advocating procrastination, of course, it’s not saying don’t face reality. No. It’s saying believe that God’s with you, guiding and sustaining you. You don’t have to do it all yourself. 

Going back to our reading for today. The disciples are going to have to go back to work again. Crowds descend on them in a deserted place. “What are we going to do?” they say. Our gospel next Sunday tells us what God does. He feeds the multitudes. They hardly have to do a thing. 

Life beyond this? In our reading today from Isaiah, Hezekiah, king of Judea, has no high hopes when he’s suddenly told he’s going to die, even as he’s engaged in crucial negotiations for his people with the Assyrians.

His thoughts are placed in the responsorial psalm of today’s liturgy:

“Once I said,
In the noontime of life I must depart!
To the gates of the nether world I shall be consigned
for the rest of my years.” 

I said, “I shall see the LORD no more
in the land of the living.
No longer shall I behold my fellow men
among those who dwell in the world.”

My dwelling, like a shepherd’s tent,
is struck down and borne away from me;
You have folded up my life, like a weaver
who severs the last thread.”

It’s not just death he mourns, as he turns to a dark wall, it’s the time of death, as he’s involved in a crucial work for his people. Death also brings him to a place where he will “see the Lord no more in the land of the living.” His experience of God in this life is taken away, and finally, he will lose those people around him who mean so much. “I shall no longer behold my fellow men among those who dwell in the world.” Life is gone.

“O Lord; I shall not die“. God is the one who gives life, our responsory says. God promises, not just life that stretches out a little while longer, but eternal life. Eternal life is not life that removes us from the work we are engaged in here on earth. It is not life that separates us from those we know and love now. It certainly is not life that takes us away from the presence of God.

You saved my life, O Lord; I shall not die.

In our reading from Isaiah yesterday, the prophet promises more than a dark pit after death. He hears humanity in the voice of Hezekiah crying out in God’s presence like “a woman about to give birth, writhing and crying out in her pains… We conceived and writhed in pain, giving birth to the wind; salvation we have not achieved for the earth, the inhabitants of the world cannot bring it forth.” Our dreams of life are shattered.

Isaiah follows that stark description of human efforts– a woman in labor, giving birth to the wind– with these words:

“But your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise;
awake and sing, you who lie in the dust.
For your dew is a dew of light,
and the land of shades gives birth.” (Isaiah 26, 16-19)

Isaiah is more than a prophet who calls for social justice and a just society. His vision of God inspires him to promise his people life beyond this.

Isaiah 38 is an important reading in the prayers of the church. It’s found in morning prayer, Holy Saturday, in morning prayer of the Office of the Dead, and morning prayer, Tuesday, week 2 of. the Liturgy of the Hours.

We remember the death and resurrection of Jesus today, Friday.

In both readings today in our liturgy, from Isaiah and Matthew, kingdoms, cities, towns are brought down. Though powerful, permanent and blessed by God  they fall into the dust. Isaiah describes the fall of Jerusalem. Matthew’s Gospel describes the fall of towns along the Sea of Galilee, like Capernaum and Corazin, where Jesus taught and worked wonders, yet they abandon  him.

Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.  Galilee, where Jesus lived most of his life and years of ministry,  became the center of Pharasaic Judaism; exiles from Judea displaced  Jewish Christians from the towns and synagogues of Galilee. Jesus was considered an enemy there. The towns where he taught and worked wonders no longer welcomed him. .

We look for lasting cities, but our readings today remind us earthly cities are not lasting, They change and sometimes disappear. “He came to his own and his own received him not”, St. John says.  Paul writes extensively in the 9th Chapter of Romans about the mystery of rejection Jesus faced from his own people. Look to the mercy of God, he says. 

We wonder about his rejection in our own towns and places.  We wonder about the future of Christianity in our part of the world. Will it disappear?

The psalms in the liturgy offer God’s message to our readings, as Psalm 48  does today: 

“God upholds his city forever. Great is the LORD and wholly to be praised
in the city of our God.
His holy mountain, fairest of heights, is the joy of all the earth.
Mount Zion…is the city of the great King.
God is with her castles; renowned is he as a stronghold.”

The times we live in have their storms like those that destroyed the ships of Tarshish, but time is like a woman in labor. Sometime new is being born and we don’t see it yet.  

This week, the 15th week of the year, we’re reading from the Prophet Isaiah at Mass, an important Old Testament book, the most frequently referenced Old Testament source in the New Testament, after the psalms. We read it extensively during Advent, Lent and Easter, and in the daily prayers of the hours.

The book is not the work of just one man, Isaiah, writing in his own lifetime. Over two centuries, from 742-500 BC, other writers quoted, added to and expanded the prophet’s words, with their own interests and time in mind. It’s a book compiled over time as one generation after another found God speaking to them in this great prophet. 

In those centuries three crucial periods in Israel’s history occurred: the emergence of the kingdom of Judea after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its people ( 587-539 BC), and the call to renewed hope for the exiled community ( 537-500 BC). So, the Book of Isaiah teaches us, first of all,  that God is not found in just one time or place.

Fr. Carroll Stuhlmueller, CP, offers a helpful summary of the Book of Isaiah in the Catholic Study Bible. Isaiah means “God saves.” Isaiah found a saving God in the messy political maneuvering of his day. Those following him afterwards brought “innovative insights into older traditions as they saw God’s saving presence in their time.” Can we learn from Isaiah to see a saving God in our time too?

“First Isaiah (1-39 ) is absorbed in the role of Jerusalem and especially the Davidic dynasty. Second Isaiah (40-55) ignores the Davidic dynasty, except for 55:3, which mentions the temple only once in a disputed passage (44:28), and considers Jerusalem as principally a religious symbol. Third Isaiah (56-66 ) completely ignores the dynasty, and contemplates a new messianic kingdom.”  (Catholic Study Bible RG 288)

Human hands, human interests, human history, human weakness are at work in the Book of Isaiah at every stage of its compilation. They’re always at work. They always get our attention. 

But the book begins with an experience that’s key to it all. Isaiah experiences a vision of God in the temple which initiates his ministry (Isaiah 6): 

”The vision of the Lord enthroned in glory stamps an indelible character on Isaiah’s ministry and provides a key to the understanding of his message. The majesty, holiness and glory of the Lord took possession of his spirit and, at the same time, he gained a new awareness of human pettiness and sinfulness. The enormous abyss between God’s sovereign holiness and human sinfulness overwhelmed the prophet. Only the purifying coal of the seraphim could cleanse his lips and prepare him for acceptance of the call: “Here I am, send me!” ( Isaiah, Introduction, New American Bible)

Is the most important lesson to draw from this book this: go before God, a merciful God who saves, and be constantly refreshed by his presence? In the presence of God we learn what it means to be merciful and turn to create a merciful society in our time.  

For this week’s homily, please watch the video below.