Today’s readings: Isaiah 35, 1-6.10; James 5, 7-10; Matthew 11, 2-11.
There is high tension in the sentiments of entire peoples today all over the world triggered by the impatience of those who suffer and who feel constantly let down by old-style politics that offers no solutions and leads to no hope. Isaiah portrays the messianic age as one of great healing. If there is something our world today yearns for it is healing.
There is a deep desire at the heart of humanity for wholeness, for redemption. All that has been said these days of Nelson Mandela, more than just praise for the giant he was, is symptomatic of how much we all yearn for more Mandelas around.
In the present social and political context, the question that faces religion is whether, as believers, we are narrating to the world a hope that is just an illusion.
As with Isaiah addressing Israel in exile, and with John the Baptist interrogating Jesus when Israel was again at a crossroad, we are going through a tough time that calls for attentiveness and wisdom.
We may know fully what humanness is, yet we very often continue in our personal lives to miss out on the essentials of a dignified existence.
The imagery James uses in the second reading of the farmer who patiently waits for the precious fruit of the ground is very appropriate but also very difficult to understand in this day and age when immediacy is the measure of true success.
We want things done and we measure people’s ability by how fast they deliver.
The farmer’s waiting in James presumes a radically different world-view from ours.
But the way we live is weighing so much on our existence, on relationships, on the true meaning of life.
We’ve become so nervous, so prone to exasperation, so impatient with ourselves. We need to go to the very roots of our impatience because with the collapse of patience, faith becomes so difficult, and meeting God hardly possible.
Just as much as it is important to keep an eye on exterior landscapes, it is equally important to stay attuned to one’s inner condition where excessive fatigue, forgetfulness, and fear may take over.
We may then, even unknowingly, opt for despair.
But as Belden Lane suggests in his book, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, we may still come to realise that our only way out of the desert is to go deeper into it, because it is in our emptiness that God meets us and that we can meet up with Him.
The desert always carries with it a sense of emptiness. This is best expressed today in Isaiah’s imagery of a wasteland turned into a most colourful garden. It is a bitter end, but it offers a new beginning.
All this sounds familiar to our modern consciousness. Very often we feel crushed by the crude reality that seems to be taking over our lives. There is still so much injustice, racism, inequality, unemployment, and all that for many shatters the possibility of a hopeful future.
In the midst of all this, we can easily fall prey to the temptation that our words as believers are hollow. But the threat and temptation of the desert landscapes always has a way of eliciting in those who are wandering what are usually called desert virtues.
Our life in the city yearns for desert virtues. These virtues come from that spiritual discipline of ‘attentiveness’ and ‘wakefulness’, which the desert fathers and mothers speak so much of. It is this discipline that can keep us on the right track and which gives us the wisdom and patience to persist in reading attentively the signs of the times and in discovering and experiencing in our times God’s healing touch.