5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
ISAIAH 6:1-8
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and exalted; the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”
At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
In the year 742, the forty-year reign of Uzziah comes to an end, years marked by prosperity. Three kings will follow—Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah—under whom the kingdom of Judah will be unfaithful to Yahweh and will face the terrible threat of the Assyrians.
Isaiah lives and prophesies during these reigns, relentlessly denouncing the vices of the people, the king, and the cult, and striving to prevent political alliances, urging them to trust in Yahweh and remain faithful to Him as the only guarantee of salvation.
The entire life of the prophet begins with this scene, in which the holiness of God is revealed to Isaiah and he is chosen as a messenger. This is the foundation of all of Isaiah’s preaching and theology: the awe before the absolute holiness of God and, consequently, the awareness of sin, intolerable before God. Therefore, the people will be punished and Jerusalem destroyed, but a remnant, faithful to the Lord, will inherit the Promise.
This text thus shows the summary of Isaiah’s entire mission, a man touched to the innermost by the holiness of God and the intolerability of human sin.
However, we cannot help but compare this message with that of Jesus. The Lord as a king on an exalted throne, with a robe that fills the Temple… merely seeing it is cause for death for the human being… This text is brought to this Sunday because of the theme of election, which will occur again in the Gospel. But these images have little to do with Jesus.
1 CORINTHIANS 15:1-11
Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all the others—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.
In the essence of our faith in Jesus is the transmission = the tradition. In the letter to the Corinthians, this important dimension is shown: we are not preaching a theory of someone unspecified or legendary. We are transmitting the faith of the witnesses, those who saw and heard him, those who accepted to continue with his project.
In the broad doctrinal content of the letter, chapter fifteen is entirely dedicated to a catechesis on the resurrection. This fragment shows a condensed summary of Paul’s faith.
Paul considers himself the last and most unworthy of the apostles, chosen by God out of pure mercy, but he also proclaims that he has worked harder than all the others, and that the faith in Jesus Christ that everyone professes is the same.
In the context of the other two readings, it is particularly interesting to consider Paul’s own description of his vocation, and his insistence that the call is pure grace, without any basis in his own merits.
José Enrique Galarreta, S.J.