Isaiah in winter

In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls for consistency between our words and our actions. If that’s the case with us, we may look forward to eternal life, depicted by Isaiah as a great banquet prepared by God.

Writing 800 years before the birth of Christ, Isaiah predated the other writer-prophets. His book is the longest and the most comprehensive of all the prophetic books.

This is because, more than any of the others, he most clearly announced Jesus Christ and Christian salvation. He prophesied so many more things about Christ and the Church, that some of the early Church Fathers, like St. Augustine actually claimed him to be an evangelist and not a prophet.

So, it’s not surprising that the iconography of Christmas includes elements not mentioned anywhere in the New Testament, but rather are taken from his writings, like the ox and the ass at the stable in Bethlehem.

His presence in Christian teaching goes right back to Jesus himself, who at the start of his preaching, in the synagogue at Nazareth, applied Isaiah’s words to himself, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me…” This was the first of many times saw himself portrayed in the words of the great Prophet.

We’ll continue to hear his words often during Advent where he’ll account for three quarters of the quotations from the Old Testament prophets. Isaiah’s writings appear in three sections. The specific motif for the first section is the long-awaited Messiah who is to come, the second, salvation for the entire world, and the third, great hopes regarding the End time.