Wednesday of Holy Week
Blessed Holy Week, everyone! Today I’m marveling at the prophets of old who heard God’s voice and spoke about Jesus our Messiah, the Suffering Servant. May their ability to hear and communicate God’s Word and the fulfillment of their prophesies give us hope and increase our faith. May we, like them, have open ears and well-trained tongues to speak a word that will “sustain the weary” whenever God gives us opportunity.
Imagine yourself as the Prophet Isaiah. Consider how you felt, what you thought, your questions, perhaps, as you heard these words from the Holy Spirit: “I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; My face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.” He’s describing Christ and the traumatic abuse he suffered during his Passion! The Isaiah texts were written centuries before Jesus’ birth and yet they describe in vivid detail specific aspects of Jesus’ suffering. Whenever I read the prophets, I’m always astonished by the clarity with which they heard and received God’s voice.
Consider our psalm, Psalm 69. King David writes of his own suffering and yet mingled with his own experience are prophetic words about the coming Messiah and future King. “For your sake I bear insult . . . because zeal for your house consumes me, and the insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.” In John’s Gospel account of Jesus turning over the tables of the money-changers in the Temple, we read, “His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me’” (John 2:17). And it gets even more astonishing, as David continues: “Insult has broken my heart, and I am weak, I looked for sympathy, but there was none; for consolers, not one could I find. Rather they put gall in my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” Matthew recognized David’s prophecy and recorded this passage in his Gospel: “They came to a place called Golgotha (which means “the place of the skull”). There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots” (Matt. 27:33-35). Centuries before Christ’s Passion, King David shared in the sufferings of Christ as he penned his prophetic words!
Today’s Gospel tells us, “One of the Twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, ‘What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?’ They paid him thirty pieces of silver, and from that time on he looked for an opportunity to hand him over.” Exodus 21:32 tells us that this sum was the price, or value, of a slave! Zechariah 11 offers a fascinating account regarding thirty silver coins, which seems to foreshadow Judas’ betrayal of Christ and his subsequent attempt to return the money.
All of the Messianic prophecies of the bible (and there are many!) give us hope and strengthen our faith in God. Centuries and centuries before the birth of Christ, God spoke to God’s people, not in generalities or vagaries, but clearly and with specific details. I see that as evidence that God is with us, God speaks to us, God desires intimate communion and fellowship with us, and God’s plan of sheer goodness is unfolding in our lives. You and I may not be “prophets,” but we surely can have prophetic moments when God gives us a word of encouragement to share with others. Our tongues become “well-trained” like Isaiah’s, not from formal training, but from training ourselves in prayer to hear God’s voice.
In Isaiah’s passage, I recognize a call to each one of us. “The Lord has given me a well-trained tongue, That I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them. Morning after morning he opens my ear that I may hear . . .” Another translation reads, “to know the word that sustains the weary.” We each know people in our lives who are weary, don’t we? We know someone(s) who is bowed down, discouraged, frightened, depressed, despairing. Let us today be people with open ears to hear a word of comfort from the Lord that we might impart to our dear ones, or even to a stranger we meet on the street. Lord, open our ears and our eyes to recognize you, our Suffering Servant, in the faces and lives of the suffering around us. God, give us the graces we need to know and receive from you the word that will “sustain the weary.” May we today, be merciful and charitable in confidence, looking to the example of the prophets to know that God does indeed speak to God’s people and speaks with clarify and specificity. Let us act upon what we hear from God, today and every day. Thanks be to God!
-Elizabeth Wells