THE VOICE OF CONSOLATION
February 5, 2006
Texts – Isaiah 40: 21-31
Mark 1: 29-39
It is the beginning of what the scribes call “The Book of Consolation.” The nation is in shambles; vast numbers of people languish in exile; millions more live amidst the rubble and bone-crushing poverty of an occupied homeland. Now comes a voice wrapped in the mantle of a prophet of old:
“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly . . . and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” [Isaiah 40: 1-2]
It is the voice of consolation. You have suffered enough, it says . . . your time of hardship and struggle is drawing to a close . . . deliverance is near.
I know a woman – let me call her Mabel . . . that’s not her real name but it’ll do for our purposes – who is well into her nineties. Mabel lives with chronic pain, twenty four hours a day. Her eyesight has deteriorated to the point where she can no longer read or even watch TV. Widowed some fifteen years, she is alone in the house of her birth. Mabel yearns to hear the voice of consolation . . . to be delivered from her prison of suffering. Who can blame her?
Here’s another – we’ll call him Steven. Steven’s employer of twenty years closed down his plant in the Springtime. The newspaper called it “a cost savings measure.” The severance package seemed fair enough. Confidant he’d find something new, he treated the first month as a well earned vacation. That was three and a half years ago. Now the voice of consolation is something Steven yearns to hear, if only in his dreams.
“You have suffered enough . . . your time of hardship and struggle is drawing to a close . . . deliverance is near.” Is that a voice you too would welcome?
I love that Southwest Airlines television advertisement. The harried office worker sitting in her cubicle clicks on a link to a web site labeled “For People Who Hate Their Jobs.” Instantly a computer virus downloads into every computer in the office network, and all her co-workers turn to stare accusingly at her. “Want to get away?” a voice asks. You bet! We all do sooner or later. Away from our embarrassment, our suffering, our humiliation. Away.
It’s no wonder Isaiah’s words have survived twenty five hundred years. They touch what is deepest in all of us.
Jesus modeled his ministry on this template. With an audacity the powers that be could not tolerate, he set out to open the floodgates of liberation. “You have suffered enough,” he said to the sick and the troubled. “Your time of hardship and struggle is drawing to a close,” he proclaimed to those living under the thumb of the world’s greatest Superpower. “Deliverance is near,” he had the temerity to say to those who had given up hope.
class=Section2>And they flocked to him. “At once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region,” is the way Mark puts it. [Mark 1: 28] “The whole city . . . gathered about the door” of the house where he was staying [v. 33] . . . “They were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, ‘What is this? A new teaching!’” [v. 27]
And the answer, of course, was “No.” There was nothing new in this teaching. Jesus was clear about that; we ought to be as well. The voice of consolation belongs to God, to the One who “stretches out the heavens like a curtain, . . . who brings princes to nought and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” [Isaiah 41: 22-23] (Try saying that three times fast while you’re watching the President of the United States deliver the State of the Union address.)
The voice of consolation . . . the voice of God . . . is the voice which comforts those who are afflicted. And some of us this morning are among them . . . and some of those we know and love are among them as well. It really doesn’t matter how we got to this place. What is absolutely essential is that we recognize we are not alone here . . . not by a long shot. Many have been here before us; millions are here with us now. How many? More than you can number. It is the way of all flesh.
Listen to Isaiah again:
“Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? [There is only One] who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers . . .; [only One] who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in . . .; [only One] who brings the mighty to nought, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” [Isaiah 40: 21-23]
Which is to say what? Do not be too impressed by those who oppress you and love nothing better than to sit in judgment of you. Do not tremble and fall down in fear before them. Neither be afraid of the diseases or the calamities which afflict your bodies and torment your spirits. This is God’s world . . . you are God’s child . . . no matter what happens, we are all in God’s hands.
Start there, Isaiah says . . . but don’t stop there. “Why do you say,” he asks, “that ‘My way is hid from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God’?” [v.27] It always feels that way, doesn’t it? It does to Mabel and to Steven. It does to me when I’m alone at night with my fears and frustrations. It does to all of us when all we want to do is “get away.” Nobody sees. Nobody knows. Nobody really understands. Isn’t that how we feel?
It is into this isolation, this place of emptiness and frustration, that Jesus comes with the voice of God’s consolation. You, he says ... I know you ... I love you ... I am here with you. You believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms ... many! One has your name on it, written with love.
It is the voice of consolation. We hear it in a prophet’s word echoing down the hallways of time. We hear it in a carpenter’s word, whispered from a cross and an empty tomb. We hear it in a place called “sanctuary,” inviting us to a banquet of bread and wine. “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young people shall fall exhausted,” it says, “but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary,
class=Section3>they shall walk and not faint.” [40: 30-31]
Trust the voice. Let go of your fear. Rest in the promise of eternal peace. Amen.