Keep watch; he is to come again

Treasures of Our Faith with Deacon Richard Vehige

On Thursday of the First Week of Advent our Church invites us to first read and reflect on a passage from the book of the prophet Isaiah (16: 1-5; 17: 4-8) entitled “Zion, refuge of the Moabites. The conversion of Ephraim”. Our treasure, which follows, is from a commentary on the Diatessaron by Saint Ephrem, deacon.

Saint Ephrem, also known as Ephrem of Syria, was born around the year 306 in the city of Nisibis (modern day Nusaybin, Turkey). In those days religious culture in the region, included polytheism, Judaism, and several varieties of early Christianity. Saint Ephraim was a prominent Christian theologian and writer who is revered as one of the most notable hymnographers of Eastern Christianity. He had a prolific pen and his writings best illumine his holiness. Although he was not a man of great scholarship, his works reflect deep insight and knowledge of the Scriptures. In writing about the mysteries of humanity’s redemption, Saint Ephrem reveals a realistic and humanly sympathetic spirit and a great devotion to the humanity of Jesus.

Saint Ephrem was ordained a deacon but declined becoming a priest. He was said to have avoided presbyteral consecration by feigning madness. Saint Ephraim is venerated as a saint by all traditional Churches. He was declared a Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church in 1920.

The Diatessaron, meaning “through the four gospels,” is the name the fourth-century Church historian Eusebius gave to a collation and combination of the gospels created by Tatian, a disciple of Justin Martyr, around 170. In this work, Tatian drew on the four canonical gospels to create a single, continuous narrative of Jesus’s life that eliminated repetition of parallel passages and harmonized discrepancies and contradictions. Probably written in Tatian’s native Syriac, the Diatessaron is one of the earliest witnesses to the text of the gospels, drawing on a form of the Greek text circulating in Rome in the mid-second century. It probably influenced many readings in the Old Syriac version of the New Testament, and enjoyed great popularity both within the Syriac- and Aramaic-speaking world and much farther afield. Not long after composing the Diatessaron, Tatian came to be considered a heretic, and by the mid-fifth century his work was finally suppressed.

Isaiah, one of the greatest of the prophets, appeared at a critical moment in Israel’s history. The Northern Kingdom collapsed, under the hammerlike blows of Assyria, in 722/721 B.C., and in 701 Jerusalem itself saw the army of Sennacherib drawn up before its walls. In the year that Uzziah, king of Judah, died, Isaiah received his call to the prophetic office in the Temple of Jerusalem.

The vision of the Lord enthroned in glory stamps an indelible character on Isaiah’s ministry and provides a key to the understanding of his message. The majesty, holiness and glory of the Lord took possession of his spirit and, at the same time, he gained a new awareness of human pettiness and sinfulness. The enormous abyss between God’s sovereign holiness and human sinfulness overwhelmed the prophet. Only the purifying coal of the seraphim could cleanse his lips and prepare him for acceptance of the call: “Here I am, send me!”

The ministry of Isaiah extended from the death of Uzziah in 742 B.C. to Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C., and it may have continued even longer, until after the death of Hezekiah in 687 B.C. Later legend (the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah) claims that Hezekiah’s son, Manasseh, executed Isaiah by having him sawed in two. During this long ministry, the prophet returned again and again to the same themes, and there are indications that he may have sometimes re-edited his older prophecies to fit new occasions.