Speak Tenderly to Jerusalem (Advent #8)

Comfort, comfort my people

says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed,

that her sin has been paid for... (Isaiah 40:1-2a)

When John the Baptist was asked by the Pharisees to give his job description and show his credentials, he responded first by denying the positions of honour that they suggested to him and secondly by quoting the prophet Isaiah, describing himself as:

A voice of one calling:

"In the desert prepare

the way of the Lord..." (Isaiah 40:3a)

And what was that desert in which he called, or the desert in which the way was to be prepared? For Israel there was one desert which resonated in their minds: the wilderness in which they wandered for 40 years after escaping Egypt but before entering the Promised Land. And when Isaiah wrote these words, he was speaking to an Israel that was facing another desert - the desert of exile in Babylon. When John the Baptist came preparing the way of the Lord, Israel was in another desert - the desert of Roman occupation. The comfort of God felt far, far away.

When Jews quoted Old Testament scripture, they were not only talking about the exact words quoted but the whole context that the scripture came from. It was expected that their audiences would know the background and fill in around the quote. So John the Baptist was not only identifying himself; he was identifying the age that had come. And that was a time of comfort for God's people.

The church in the West is sufficiently comfortable and complacent that we seem therefore to miss a huge amount of what Jesus came to do. We don't understand what it meant to set captives free, because we don't understand what it is to be captives. We sing about Immanuel "ransoming captive Israel" but the words are potentially no more than figures of speech.

Perhaps the persecuted church could teach us something about longing for Jesus' second coming as first century Jews longed for the first. Perhaps they could help us understand Simeon's joy on meeting "the consolation of Israel". Perhaps then it might mean something to read Isaiah 40 and to know that, when Jesus came, He fulfilled all of that, and that we who believe are just on the cusp of knowing and experiencing precisely what that means.

So for our music today we have something a bit different. I have found myself unexpectedly discovering some music of late that draws heavily on Jewish and Middle Eastern roots in capturing the emotions of some of the Psalms and prayers of the Old and New Testaments. For this, I can strongly recommend Aaron Strumpel's two animal-themed albums, but today I would like to share a version of the Lord's Prayer sung by highly eccentric and experimental outfit Psalters. You can, I think, imagine that you are seated with the early church, waiting, hoping, begging to God for the consolation of His people. It's quite long, and it isn't an easy listen. But sit back, take it in, and perhaps then read Isaiah 40 and pray that these words will truly resonate with you this Advent.