In today's first reading, Isaiah 41: 13-20, the Lord speaks through the prophet, saying to us: "I am the Lord, your God, who grasp your right hand; it is I who say to you, 'Fear not, I will help you.' Fear not, O worm Jacob, O maggot Israel; I will help you, says the Lord; your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel. I will make of you a threshing sledge, sharp, new, and double-edged, to thresh the mountains and crush them, to make the hills like chaff. When you winnow them, the wind shall carry them off and the storm shall scatter them. But you shall rejoice in the Lord, and glory in the Holy One of Israel."
Reading this, I am, at first, offended by the Lord describing Jacob and Israel as worms and maggots. What? a worm? a maggot? Then the thought came to me of the transformation of each of us when, as Isaiah says later in this passage, we are made "a threshing sledge, sharp, new, and doubled-edged, to thresh the mountains [of sin] and crush them, to make the hills chaff." What are we, in Christ Jesus, threshing and turning into chaff which the wind blows away? Mountains of pride and selfishness, of deceitfulness and corruption; in short, sin in us is transformed, by grace, into holiness! All of this leads us to "rejoice in the Lord, and glory in the Holy One of Israel."
Through the shedding of His blood on the cross and His resurrection from the dead, Jesus clothed us with a mantle of justice and put a robe of salvation on us. In our baptism we died with Christ and rose with Him; hence the "mountains" are crushed and the "hills"turned to chaff, rough ways are made smooth and the heavens are opened for the redeemed!
That is why God became human!
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