Foreigners Joined to the Lord

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Isaiah 56:1, 6-7

Thus says the LORD:

Observe what is right, do what is just;

for my salvation is about to come,

my justice, about to be revealed.

The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,

ministering to him,

loving the name of the LORD,

and becoming his servants—

all who keep the sabbath free from profanation

and hold to my covenant,

them I will bring to my holy mountain

and make joyful in my house of prayer;

their burnt offerings and sacrifices

will be acceptable on my altar,

for my house shall be called

a house of prayer for all peoples.

In the final eleven chapters of the Book of Isaiah, chapters 56-66, the prophet turns his attention beyond his contemporaries living in exile in Babylon in the 500’s B.C. and looks centuries into the future. In these latter days, he sees a time when those who were excluded from the Mosaic Covenant, the non-semitic people, will be included in a covenant that surpasses the one mediated by Moses. 

You and I are foreigners for the most part. Very few of us are semitic by blood, members of the original Chosen People. We are descendants of the foreigners that Isaiah speaks about, the outsiders who in the words of St. Paul were grafted into the People of God (see Romans 11:11-31). It is easy for us to lose sight of the magnitude of this. After all, for our entire lives and for millennia before our time, there has been “neither Jew nor Gentile” in the Church (Galatians 3:28). But there once was a very long time when our people were excluded. Now, thanks to the initiative of the Lord spoken of in this reading, even we the foreigners have been chosen. In a decaying cultural Catholicism, it is good to be reminded that in the eyes of God we are not blandly the People of God. We were chosen for this purpose and expressly invited into the covenant. As Pope Pius XI famously stated, spiritually, all Christians are Semites. 

This should be a cause for great joy and not just an interesting factoid of salvation history. The Lord promises to make us foreigners  “joyful in my house of prayer.” When he took on flesh, the God-man even cleansed the Temple, specifically the outermost Court of the Gentiles where foreigners were supposed to come to worship the one true God, and when he did it he directly quoted this passage from Isaiah. With the money changers out of the way, the foreigners could again approach the house of the Lord with joy. After the Resurrection, the foreigners were fully grafted into the covenant family of God. The way was paved for you and me to be brought in and not simply to be kept at arm’s length. We have been brought so close to the presence of God that Isaiah describes it in specifically priestly terms. He says that we foreigners will minister to the Lord, becoming his servants (as in serving the Lord at the altar), and will offer sacrifices acceptable on the altar. 

The Lord is all about drawing in the foreigners so that they can be close to him, family with him, that he might live inside of them. That goes for all foreigners, whether it be a Canaanite woman with a possessed daughter or your fallen-away relative who has made himself or herself into a foreigner. The exhausted parents with the busy little kids, the divorced or separated, the person with all the hard questions, you, the person with the present that you wish was your past, all of us foreigners who do not fit the mold the Lord calls to him, to embrace covenant living, and to be joyful in his house of prayer.