Healing and Deliverance (23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

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After declaring God’s judgment on Judah and the nations for their wickedness and failure to uphold justice, the book of Isaiah shifts in theme to how, despite their sins, the people of Israel will experience deliverance from the punishment that was meted out to them. This deliverance is described in miraculous terms here, which emphasizes the fact that just as it was God who rendered judgment in the first place, only God can take them out of their plight. This is to show how God will not always be angry at His people, but will eventually turn away His wrath and show mercy, as Psalm 30:5 tells us: “For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”

The immediate fulfillment of this prophecy was the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Exile, as signaled by verse 10: “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing;

everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” However, as with many Biblical passages, there are multiple fulfillments to this passage, since not everything specified in the passage happened during the return from Exile. The blind, deaf and lame were not made whole again then, nor did the land experience the miraculous revival mentioned in verses 1-2 and 8-9.

We see in the Gospels—especially this Sunday’s reading—how the prophecy about the blind seeing, the deaf hearing and the lame regaining their sight was fulfilled at the time of Jesus. He performed all of the miraculous healings described in the passage. In so doing, He shows how the coming deliverance from sin was greater than the first deliverance that happened five hundred years prior.

Yet part of the prophecy remains to be fulfilled. The revivification of the land points forward to the Second Coming, when there will be a new earth, and a new Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22). At that time, everything that God has promised will come to pass, and His people (not only Jews, but also Gentiles who believe in Christ) will finally experience ultimate peace.

J. Luis Dizon