Friday of the First Week of Advent

Today's Mass Readings

Readings like the ones we have today seem to be unmitigated hopeful messages. The prophet Isaiah makes hopeful announcements of how the world will change when the Messiah comes! Isaiah proclaims that the deaf shall hear, and the eyes of the blind shall see, surely a very good thing (Isaiah 29:17-24). Even our bodies will become new and whole, when the Messiah comes. The Gospel reading continues the theme by telling of a time when Jesus healed two blind men and gave them sight (Matthew 9:27-31). Jesus is very clearly named as the Messiah, as the one who brings God’s justice in this passage. Matthew means for us to understand that Jesus is the one about whom Isaiah spoke. Here is the man, in the flesh! It is good news: the Messiah prophets proclaimed is really here! And yet, I suspect that some of us might have a bit of difficulty with these readings. We might ask, where are all the people being healed today? Where is this holiness and understanding of which the prophet speaks? None of these appear to be present, and so we think God must have forgotten about us or that maybe the whole “Jesus thing” just isn’t true. Our culture is very skeptical, after all.
For some, these scriptures might hit us more personally. I have had a moderate to profound hearing loss since birth. When I was a kid, I hated the fact that I had to wear hearing aids when other kids didn’t. I wanted Jesus to come and heal me of my hearing loss, just like he had healed people in the New Testament.

Later on, as I was growing up to be an adult, I started relying on my hearing loss to help me get advantages and attention from others. For example, people would get me front row seats in a standing-room only crowd, even though it was not necessary for me. It was a nice attention-getting gig sometimes too, for if I felt neglected in conversation, I could raise some kind of topic about being hard-of-hearing. It got to the point that I started feeling like my hearing loss defined who I was. At that point, scripture passages like the one from Isaiah mocked me because I felt that if Jesus really offered to heal me tomorrow, I didn’t know if I would really want it!

Then I started realizing how selfish I was being, and how unhealthy it was to bank my identity in my hearing loss. I began to realize that my identity was about far more than my hearing loss. It was about being a child of God. Now, that’s a far more hopeful message - I do not have to feel confined to any one aspect of who I am! God has not healed my hearing (yet), but in a way God is healing both my sight and my hearing. I am learning to see the world not with the skeptic’s eyes and ears, but with new and different eyes and ears.

Let us reflect today on the ways God is already changing our ways of seeing and hearing even as we wait for God to come to us this Advent.

- Jana Bennett