I’ve been talking a lot in recent Sunday reflections about being watchful, which is the theme of this week’s Sunday Gospel at Mass, so I want to focus on the first reading instead.

Isaiah says, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you, while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for.”

It’s so crazy to think that Isaiah wrote this some 800 years before Jesus. Before the Incarnation. Before God DID, in the Person of the Son, “rend the heavens and come down, working awesome deeds we could not hope for.”

Can you imagine the longing in Isaiah’s heart? A longing that we . . . that we can live without, because it’s been fulfilled? Have you ever thought what a blessing it is to live when we do, with full knowledge of how God has worked our salvation and how he offers us eternal life?

Jesus tells His Apostles, “Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”

Isaiah and Jeremiah. David and Josiah. Ezekiel and Daniel. Hezekiah and Jehoshaphat. And so many more . . . God offered them salvation, and but they didn’t see Christ.

In the Spirit, we DO see and hear Christ. We are blessed to live in the full knowledge of what God has done for us in His Son. How often do we take that knowledge for granted? How often do we live as though it were nothing?

That’s worth reflecting on.

Blessed are our eyes.