The first reading yesterday gives us the entire 35th chapter of Isaiah (vv. 1-10).  It is a beautiful and uplifting passage which contains a promise of redemption for a devastated people.  The land will be healed, and the people too, both physically and spiritually, culminating in the final verse: “They will meet with joy and gladness, sorrow and mourning will flee.”

This provides great comfort for us today as well.  No matter what depths we reach physically, emotionally, or spiritually, we know that we have won through the triumph of the Son of God, the promised one, over sin, Satan, and eternal death.

This from St. Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (69, 6) expands on Jesus as fulfiller of the promise in Isaiah (as referred to in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, 159):

The spring of living water which gushed forth from God in the land destitute of the knowledge of God, namely the land of the Gentiles, was this Christ, who also appeared in your nation, and healed those who were maimed, and deaf, and lame in body from their birth, causing them to leap, to hear, and to see, by His word. And having raised the dead, and causing them to live, by His deeds He compelled the men who lived at that time to recognise Him. But though they saw such works, they asserted it was magical art. For they dared to call Him a magician, and a deceiver of the people. Yet He wrought such works, and persuaded those who were [destined to] believe in Him; for even if any one be labouring under a defect of body, yet be an observer of the doctrines delivered by Him, He shall raise him up at His second advent perfectly sound, after He has made him immortal, and incorruptible, and free from grief.