First reading (Isaiah 35:1-6, 10). This contains a message of hope for God’s people in exile. The prophet assures them that God himself is coming to their rescue and will lead them back to Zion. He uses the image of the desert, made fertile by rain, to portray the confident hope that God would restore his people, crushed by misfortune. Their most crippling disabilities – blindness, deafness, and lameness – will be relieved when God sends salvation to his people.
Second reading (James 5:7-10). St James is talking about the second coming of Jesus. He urges the kind of patience and hope farmers show in waiting for the harvest, and which the prophets of old showed as they waited for the promises to be fulfilled.
Gospel (Matthew 11:2-11). John the Baptist’s image of the Messiah was that of a stern judge who would execute a fiery judgement. But Jesus did not fit this image. This may account for John’s doubts about him. Jesus dispelled John’s doubts by showing that he was doing precisely the kind of things that had been predicted for the messianic times (by prophets such as Isaiah). Once again, Matthew presents Jesus as the one who fulfils the messianic prophecies.
Jesus goes on to praise John, declaring him to be a true prophet. He is more than a prophet: he glimpsed the age of fulfilment. As the forerunner of the Messiah, he was in a very privileged position. Yet he himself did not belong to the kingdom. Jesus says that ‘the least in the kingdom is greater (more privileged) than he’. Far from diminishing John’s role in God’s plan of salvation, this increases his heroism in that he prepared the way for a kingdom that he himself would never enter (on earth).