Patristic Wisdom: Looking to the Fourth Sunday in Lent

And in that day, you will say, “I will bless You, O Lord. Although You were angry with me, You turned away Your anger and had mercy on me. Behold, God is my Savior and Lord. I will trust in Him and be saved by Him. I will not be afraid, for the Lord is my glory and my praise. He has become my salvation.” You will draw water with gladness from the wells of salvation. In that day, you will say, “Praise the Lord; call upon His name. Declare His glorious things among the Gentiles and make mention that His name is exalted. Sing to the name of the Lord, for He has done great things. Declare this in all the earth. Exult and be glad, O inhabitants of Zion, for the Holy One of Israel is exalted in her midst.” (Isaiah 12:1–6 LXX)

You who had previously said in the desert, when you came up out of the land of Egypt and the Red Sea was dried up, “Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magnificent,” and the rest, now that the tongue of the sea of Egypt has been struck and its river has dried up, cut up, and laid low, you glorify the Lord and say, I will confess to you, O Lord, because I who deserved your anger and fury have attained mercy; for You are my Savior, that is, Jesus, and I will not have confidence in idols, nor will I fear things that are not to be feared, but You are my strength and my praise, You who have become my salvation. Let the most depraved heresy hear that He has become the Lord for those who are saved and those for whom He was not the Lord before. Consequently, we understand creation and becoming in the Scriptures not always as the establishment of those things that did not exist before, but as, occasionally, grace, for those who merited that He become their God.

The one whom he above called “Emmanuel,” then “take away the spoils, hasten to plunder,” and other terms, he now calls Savior, lest there appear to be another besides Him whom Gabriel announced to the Virgin, saying, “And you will call His name Jesus, for He will save His people.” He also prophesies that waters must be drawn out of His fountains—not out of the waters of the rivers of Egypt, which were struck, nor out of the waters of the rivers of Rezin, but out of the fountains of Jesus, for this is what savior expresses in the Hebrew language. This is why Jesus himself cried out in the Gospel, “Let anyone who thirsts come to me, and let anyone who believes in me drink; as the Scripture has said, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his belly.’ This,” says the evangelist, “he said of the Holy Spirit, whom those who believed in him were about to receive.” And in another Gospel he says, “The one who drinks from the water that I will give him will never thirst again, for the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.” We should understand the Savior’s fountains to be the Gospel teaching, about which we read in the sixty-seventh Psalm, “In the churches bless God the Lord, from the fountains of Israel.”

The apostles and the remnant of Israel are commanding these things to those who have believed from the Gentiles, that they confess to the Lord alone, and call upon His name, after they have forsaken their idols. Let them declare all His works to the unbelievers, that they may know that He alone is exalted, to whom one must sing that He has done great things, and let His mercy be declared in all the earth.

Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah 4.12