“Console my people; console them” says your God.
We heard these words in today’s first reading. They come at the beginning of the second part of Isaiah; his “Book of Consolation”. With these words, Handel’s Messiah memorably opens. According to the Authorised Version of the Bible: Comfort ye; comfort ye my people. Handel sets this for a tenor solo. The singer comes in for the moment unsupported by the orchestra, pronouncing the words with the utmost simplicity, so that they seem to come as it were floating in out of the blue. They’re astonishing words; their impact made all the stronger for their apparent lack of context. Who is speaking? Who can give consolation where it would seem there is none? Handel wonderfully brings out the force of Isaiah’s text with a great rising crescendo: saith your God: saith your God.
A few verses before, in the book of Isaiah Chapter 39, the Prophet was foretelling the Babylonian exile to King Hezekiah. Now suddenly, at the beginning of Chapter 40, it seems we’ve jumped 150 years. The worst has happened. The people had been repeatedly warned. They refused to amend their ways. Now they’ve received the punishment that was coming to them. And God speaks again: only now no longer words of warning and threat, but only of consolation and hope.
All that follows can very easily be applied to the coming of Christ. Many of the Fathers of the Church indeed said that must be the primary meaning of the text; what was uppermost in Isaiah’s mind. The return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon would then be only an incidental, secondary meaning, which need not occupy too much of our attention. Isaiah, say the Fathers, speaks here not as a prophet, but as an evangelist. The Greek version of the Old Testament even uses that word in verse 9. Our version translates “Joyful messenger of Zion”. In Greek: “Evangelist, preacher of the Good News”.
Certainly all four Gospels report St. John the Baptist taking words from our passage: Prepare a way for the Lord; make his paths straight.
In St. Mark’s version, which we’ve just heard, John just appears out of nowhere; he’s at first just a voice; like the tenor solo in Handel; like the original prophecy in Isaiah. John is an extremely striking, even startling figure; but his message is essentially simple. What he says is what Advent says; what the Liturgy says. It’s this: Christ is the fulfilment of this prophecy; and of all prophecy. Christ is the good news. All the hopes of Israel - all the hopes of mankind - are fulfilled in him, and more than fulfilled: for he’s better and greater even than anything the poetic imagination could express.
Christ is also the definitive consolation; the consolation that cannot be taken away from us. All the other lesser consolations that come our way in life are vulnerable; we can lose them; they can be outweighed by tragedy. But if everything else whatever is taken away, if we have Christ we have everything.
Today we need to hear these words of consolation. Perhaps if people become too affluent and comfortable their awareness of this need may be dulled. But think of refugees, for example now in Ethiopia; or relatives of victims of a terrorist attack; or people negatively affected by the pandemic; or indeed anyone who’s experienced a traumatic shock in their life. Our text of Isaiah is addressed to them, to us, and it contains words of life.
Christ doesn’t just offer a future hope: he makes sense of present suffering. For Isaiah that means: just punishment for sins. But Jesus cried out on the Mountain: Blessed are those who mourn - for they shall be consoled. So even as we wait for the fulfilment of the promise, the blessing of Jesus touches us where we are, however dark the situation. Through mourning and loss, through suffering, we find ourselves united with the Heart of Jesus; invited to share with him in his redemptive work. With him we bear, in a sense, all the sins and sufferings of the world, and one day, in heaven, we’ll understand the value of it all.
A friend of mine recently died filled with this hope. Struck down by cancer in her prime of life, she had to cross a wilderness of pain and debility, and finally dissolution. But she knew she was on a royal road to Christ; to the fullness of life and of joy; and her holy death was a most consoling sign to all who loved her that none of it had been wasted.
We see the consolation of Christ in the Christmas crib; we see it in his preaching and miracles; we see it in his death, and in his resurrection. On whichever aspect of his mystery we gaze, Isaiah cries out to us: Behold, your God! See him in his weakness; see him in his compassion as the Good Shepherd, but also see him in his power: his arm subduing all things before him.
The words of today’s first reading are not just nice poetry, or uplifting music: they’re words of truth; divine words addressed directly to ourselves. We should listen to them very carefully and seriously. How do we respond? Our task is plain: we must ever prepare a way for God in our hearts. Of course we must reject sin; but also we must realise, confess, fully experience our need for him: open our hearts to receive him more and more.
Unfortunately, there remains an ever present and terrible possibility: that we reject the consolation of Christ, in favour of some much lesser but more apparently immediate consolation. To do that is not just morally wrong: it’s deeply foolish. Isaiah, St. John the Baptist, all the Saints, all our own monastic fathers would tell us: No matter how tempted you may be; no matter how much afflicted and assailed by troubles of every sort: look to God, look to Christ in total trust, knowing for certain that he is faithful, that his word endures, and that his promises will be fulfilled.