“So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; It shall not return to me empty, but shall do what pleases me, achieving the end for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:11)
Saint Jerome offers the following insight on this verse from today’s First Reading:
“For my thoughts are not like the thoughts of human beings, and as far as the heaven is from the earth, so much are my thoughts separated from the thoughts of human beings. For I am extremely gracious and very much for forgiving — so that once I have promised and it has come out of my mouth, it will not be void, but everything will be completed through its efficacy.” According to the anagogical sense, there is a double meaning here, because the Word of the Lord or he about whom it is written, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.”16 God’s word does not return to him void, only through his doing the will of his Father as he filled all things on account of which he had become embodied and reconciled the world to God. He is the One who is said to proceed out of his mouth and out of the womb and vulva, not that God has bodily parts like that but so that we learn the nature of the Lord through our words. Or it indeed could be said that the word of gospel teaching may be called “rainstorms” and the rain that the spiritual clouds pour over the good earth, where the truth of God has reached.” (Commentary on Isaiah, 15)
Collect
Almighty ever-living God,
Who, when Christ had been baptized
in the River Jordan
and as the Holy Spirit descended upon Him,
solemnly declared him Your Beloved Son,
grant that Your children by adoption,
reborn of water and the Holy Spirit,
may always be well pleasing to You.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
Who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.
Who, when Christ had been baptized
in the River Jordan
and as the Holy Spirit descended upon Him,
solemnly declared him Your Beloved Son,
grant that Your children by adoption,
reborn of water and the Holy Spirit,
may always be well pleasing to You.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
Who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.
Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen
