Then Your Light Shall Break Forth: The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany (Fr. Roberts )

​Why do we fast, but you do not see?

This is the cry of people who feel that God has gone quiet. They have kept the fast. They have bowed the head and spread the ashes. They have done what the religion requires. And nothing has happened. Heaven is closed. God feels remote, sealed away behind something they cannot name.

We know this condition. Perhaps not the sackcloth. But the sense that faith occupies one room of life and the rest of the house is empty of God, we know that. We have inherited a world that has divided reality in two: the sacred over here, the secular over there, as though God inhabits one half of existence and the other half runs on its own without him. There is a thinness to our experience of God that we can feel but rarely name.

The people in Isaiah's day had the same thinness, and it is worth understanding what had caused it. Their failure was not simply that they were hypocrites, cruel on weekdays and pious on the Sabbath. It was something more fundamental. They had made worship into a thing that could exist apart from the material world. A transaction between the soul and God that need not touch the body, the neighbor, the concrete stuff of daily life. They had sealed God inside the temple and themselves inside their devotions, and the hungry could remain hungry because that belonged to a different order of things altogether.

God's answer is fierce and strange, because he does not address the question on its own terms. The people ask about worship. God answers with bodies.

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Notice how relentlessly physical this is. Bread. Shelter. Clothing. Bonds cut from wrists. God does not prescribe a better spiritual technique. He points to the bodies around them and says, There. There is where your fast must reach. Not deeper into the self but further out into the flesh of the world.

Why? Because the God of Israel has always worked through material things. He made a world of matter and called it good. He fed his people with manna. He dwelt among them in a tent and then in a temple. And in the fullness of time, he took flesh himself. He is the God who hallows the material order, who fills it with his presence, who refuses, absolutely refuses, to be worshipped in a way that leaves the world empty of himself.

And this brings us to the promise, one of the most luminous passages in all of Holy Scripture:

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

We must not read this as a transaction. The light that breaks forth is not a payment for services rendered. It is a presence unveiled. When the fast reaches the neighbor, when bread is broken and bodies are tended, what happens is not that God finally decides to show up. What happens is that we see, at last, that he was there all along, hidden in the very places we were trained to think he could not be.

St. Jerome, reading this passage, understood plainly whose light it is that breaks forth like the dawn. It is Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, rising with healing in his wings. It is the light that was in the beginning, the light that shines in the darkness, the light the darkness has never overcome. And it breaks forth (mark the word, breaks, as one breaks bread, as dawn breaks the night) through the material, the bodily, the concrete. Christ is already present in this text. We do not put him there. We find him there.

And here is where we must see something that will change the way we read not only Isaiah but the whole of our Christian life. Look again at what God asks of his people. Share your bread with the hungry. Is this not what Christ does with us at the altar? He takes bread, he blesses it, he breaks it, he gives it, and it is his own Body. When you see the naked, cover them. Is this not what Christ does with us at the font? In baptism we are clothed with Christ; we put him on like a garment. Loose the bonds of injustice; let the oppressed go free. Is this not what Christ does when he speaks the word of absolution and the chains of sin fall away?

The works of mercy and the sacraments are not two separate things. They are one reality moving in a single direction: from God to us and through us to his world. The sacraments are the source; the works of mercy are their fruit. Both are Christ embodied, for his Church and as his Church.

This is what has been severed, and not only in us, but in our whole civilization. We have built a wall between the sacred and the secular, as though God's presence stopped at the church door and the world beyond were left to run on its own. And when this wall stands, both sides wither. The sacraments shrink into private devotions. The works of mercy shrink into mere programs, emptied of any sense that God is in them. Neither carries the weight of glory, because neither is seen for what it truly is: Christ, present in flesh, doing what he has always done.
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This is exactly what our Lord unveils in the Sermon on the Mount. He looks at his small company of disciples and tells them not what they must become but what they already are.

You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.

The light that was promised, the light that would break forth when worship and life were joined, is standing before them. And he tells them that this light lives now in them. Not as a task to be accomplished but as an identity received: they are salt, they are light, because they are in him and he is in them.

But salt that has become foolish (and the word in the original means precisely that, foolish, not merely tasteless) is good for nothing. Light hidden under a bushel basket ceases to do what light exists to do. The identity is real, but it can be rendered void. Not by failing to achieve something new but by refusing to be what you already are: by keeping Christ sealed in the temple and the neighbor out of view. Isaiah's people had done exactly this. They had become foolish salt. And the world around them had gone dark.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.

To fulfill. To fill full. Everything the law and prophets demanded, all the justice, all the mercy, all the righteousness Isaiah cried out for, Christ does not set it aside. He fills it to the brim with himself. He is what it was all reaching toward: the one in whom God and flesh are permanently joined. And so when he says, Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven, he is not prescribing a more demanding code. What he is offering is altogether different: not a stricter law but a living union with himself. The greater righteousness is not our achievement. It is his presence: his life in us, working itself out through hands that feed, arms that shelter, hearts that will not hide from their own kin.

In a few moments we will come to the altar. Bread will be taken, blessed, broken, and given. The same God who will not be worshipped apart from the flesh of the world will give himself to us in flesh: in bread, in wine, in the Body and Blood of his Son. And he does this not so that we may keep him safely within these walls. He does it so that we may carry him out into the world he made: into kitchens and shelters and hospitals and streets. For the sacrament does not end at the altar rail. It continues in every loaf shared, every door opened, every bond broken, every garment placed on cold shoulders. His life, poured out and poured through, until the whole world is filled with the glory that Isaiah promised.

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

He is here. In the word. In the bread. In the neighbor. And when we keep the fast that God chooses, when we carry what we receive at this altar into the flesh of the world, we no longer cry, 'Why do we fast, but you do not see?' Rather… We fast. And at last, we see."