Patristic Wisdom: Looking to the Fourth Sunday in Lent

I held My peace, and I will not always be silent and restrain Myself. Now I will be steadfast, like a woman in labor. I shall amaze and dry up together. I will make the rivers into coastlands and dry up marsh-meadows. I will bring the blind by a way they did not know and will cause them to tread paths they have not known. I will turn darkness into light for them, and make crooked places straight. These things I will do for them and not forsake them. But they turned back. You be greatly ashamed who trust in carved images, who say to the molded images, “You are our gods.” (Isa 42:14-17 LXX)

The prophetic words are describing the glorious advent of the Savior, of which the Apostle Paul also speaks, “In accordance with the illumination of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.” He compares him to a very mighty man who will wage war against his adversaries and stir up jealousy... And the meaning is,

For a long time I carried you as you transgressed often, but I who had previously held my peace will no longer keep silent. And just as a woman in labor brings forth an infant into the light and brings into the open what was previously being held confined within, so I will now bring forth my grief and dissimulation that I always had because of your evil deeds, and I will destroy your plans. At one time I will swallow up every nation and all the pride of the mountains and the swelling up of your hills, and I will reduce to a desert the grass, of which it was said above, “Truly the people is grass,” that is, both the princes and the ignoble common people.

And when I will have dried you up and destroyed you from head to foot, at that time I will cause rivers of my teaching to flow to the islands of the Gentiles, and will reduce to dryness your standing pools, or “marshes.” Accordingly, the knowledge of the Scriptures will be among the Gentiles, and the dryness of doctrine among you. And I will lead the blind by the way which they did not know before. We also read about this above, “I have given you for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles, that you may open the eyes of the blind” (Isa 42:6). They will be led by the way of which Christ speaks: “I am the way”; or I will make them walk on the way of the knowledge of God and in the paths of the prophets.

At that time their darkness will be turned to light, and crooked things will be turned to straight so that they understand what they read, and view with the eyes of their hearts the bright light of Christ in the Old Testament.

And at the same time he adds, These things have I done, or “will I do,” to them. I am not promising additional things to come, but delivering on what I had previously promised. But while I am saying these things, the Jewish people have been turned back, so that they did not believe the one who made the promises, and they were confounded by their own errors, and they neglected God’s promise, the people who had previously believed in idols.

Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah