Seeing leafless trees is not common for people from countries with no seasons like my native Colombia. Someone from Colombia who had moved to the United States once was telling me about a relative of his who came to visit him during a winter season. When he asked the visiting person about how she liked the United States, the answer was that she could not understand why we do not cut all those dead trees down.

A common daily scene for us here during late fall is to see the tree leaves wither and fall dry to the ground. The wind carries the leaves away and the leaf blowers make them fly to a place to be collected and discarded. The prophet Isaiah in today’s lovely first reading gives this image about the people of Israel, “We have all withered like leaves, and our guilt carries us away like the wind”.

The reading is an excerpt from a prayer of lamentation that the people of Israel raised to God. At that time, they were back in the Holy Land after the long seven decades of exile in Babylon. They begged the Lord to come once more to their aid, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you”. They had that image of the Lord’s visiting his people in the desert perfectly recorded in their national memory. They now wish that the Lord would perform such a miracle for their own sake.

The Church gives us this reading during this season of Advent because this verse contains the universal human desire for the full revelation of God. In the lamentation prayer they acknowledged that the Lord was right by being angry with them for their sins. And they confessed their sins: “we are sinful; all of us have become like unclean people, all our good deeds are like polluted rags; we have all withered like leaves, and our guilt carries us away like the wind”.

These words fittingly express our human condition of being sinners. “All our good deeds are like polluted rags”. The people of Israel at the time could not produce anything totally good because they were under the power of sin. In other words, because the Savior had not yet come to redeem us from this condition, they could not perform at a higher level of morality. Throughout Old Testament times, real forgiveness was not possible in the theological sense. The expiation of sins had not taken place through the passion and death of the redeemer. The guilt felt for the sins was present all the time in the people’s consciences. They were right when they said that their guilt carried them away like the wind.

This prayer of lamentation of the people of Israel is given to the Church today as the word of God and our own prayer of lamentation for our sins. The people of Israel foreshadowed the Church. Now, because we live in the time after the Lord’s birth, this confession of our sins is hopeful and our understanding of our human condition of sin is not one of doom. There is hope for improvement in the goodness of our deeds. In fact, now that the Lord has redeemed us and given us his divine grace, he has equipped us to perform at a much greater level of morality. The Lord now invites us and challenges us to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect!

The certainty of the Lord’s forgiveness, given to us first at Baptism and after it in the sacrament of reconciliation, guarantees us that our guilt does not carry us away like the wind. When we confess our sins to a priest, their haunting power is taken away from us. We certainly remember our sins after confessing them; and we should always keep them in our mind, especially the big ones so that we do not commit them again. This memory of our sins after confession does not have the heavy burden of guilt that sins not confessed and not forgiven do.  

One final image to afford us hope comes from the Lord’s farewell speech at the Last Supper, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit because without me you can do nothing”. We are no longer withered and blown away leaves. We are the Lord’s branches, deeply connected to his divine grace and love. Thanks be to God for rending the heavens and coming down in the person of our Lord.

Finally, let us humbly ask the Lord to grant us his grace to truly know our sins and his mercy.