To be honest, I have never been comfortable with the fact that my favorite color, red, is identified by the prophet as the color of sin. All my life I have liked the color red and really wanted a red car. So now that I have a red car, I am quick to point out that red is the color of blood, and taking the life of another was regarded by the prophets as the most terrible sin. Hence the identification with the color.
The heart of the message is not about the color of sin. The heart of the message comes in the very simple words that God addresses to sinners: “Come, let us set things right.” God desires that we be in right relationship and reaches out to us with the promise of forgiveness.
The Gospel marries another thought to that promise. It is the person who is humble who will experience true right relationship with God. We live in a time when self-promotion could be said to be at epidemic proportions. Yet the Gospel offers us the exact opposite pattern of life for emulation. God is our Teacher, our Master, and our Father. We are called to be the student, the servant and the child. No matter what our image of God is at the moment, there is a corresponding right relationship for us to take on. While Isaiah reminds us of the covenant behaviors, Jesus sums it up in the notion of being the servant of all.
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator