5th February 2012 - The Third Sunday before Lent

Suffering is part of every human life. The renowned cancer specialist Bernie Siegel has written, "One cannot get through life without pain.  What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us." When people suffer one of two things happen to them, either they grow or they diminish, and one can never tell which it will be. I have seen people descend into hopeless pits of self pity or grow into triumphant examples of courage. And sometimes it surprises you who it is that turns out to be this person of courage and triumph.

The same can be true of communities. Terrible things can happen to a community, and in one place that will leave an inheritance of bitterness and resentment which will poison that community for generations to come. And then, in another place, something equally terrible can happen and in the unpromising soil seeds of mutual care, of mutual love, can grow. And again there sometimes seems no rhyme or reason as to which way that community will go.

Isaiah chapter forty arises out of nearly a century of tragedy and loss. Most scholars believe that the section beginning at the fortieth chapter of Isaiah was written substantially later than the preceding thirty-nine chapters. Isaiah chapters one to thirty-nine were written during the collapse of the kingdom of Judah. They end with a prediction that the land of Judah will be conquered by the Babylonians and its treasures and people taken away. This prediction came true with the fall of Jerusalem in  588BC. For the people of Jerusalem and Judea it was devastating. An unknown poet wrote in the Book of Lamentations:

The people of Judah are slaves, suffering in a foreign land, with no rest from sorrow. Their enemies captured them and were terribly cruel. The roads to Zion mourn because no one travels there to celebrate the festivals. The city gates are deserted; priests are weeping. Young women are raped; Zion is in sorrow! Enemies now rule the city and live as they please. The LORD has punished Jerusalem because of her awful sins; he has let her people be dragged away.

It is a an utterly traumatic event. It would have been understandable for the Jewish people to simply have given up on their identity. To be absorbed into the general populace of Babylonian empire and to have disappeared from history. This was, after all, what had happened to the northern Kingdom of Israel – the so called ten lost tribes when they had been conquered by the Assyrian empire a hundred and fifty years before.

But that wasn’t what happened. Instead Judean’s retained their identity and remained faithful worshipers of God. In the context of their captivity their faith did not disappear but instead grew and developed. In captivity the books of the Old Testament were gather and edited together. In captivity the life of the community began to focus on those books. It was in captivity that the Jewish tradition of Biblical Scholarship began to grow and in captivity that the institution of the synagogue began to develop. In captivity the peoples vision of God was transformed from tribal deity to the one and only God. The Babylonian captivity was the furnace in which modern Judaism was forged.

After sixty years the prophet speaks again, and his words are words of encouragement:

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.  Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD'S hand double for all her sins.

Soon the Exile will draw to a close. In 538BC Babylon itself will fall to the army of Cyrus king of Persia and he will decree that all who wish may return to lands from which they were exiled. Though after long years of exile it might seem like God has forgotten his people this is not the case, and now he will prove it:

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, 'My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God'? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Under Ezra, Nehemiah and Zerubbabel a slow movement back to Jerusalem begins and the reconstruction of the city and temple is undertaken. The hope carefully preserved in the long years of exile becomes the seed which something even greater arises.

Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength. Most of us live lives of reasonable comfort and it is easy for us to take that comfort for granted. When suffering comes it can take us completely by surprise simply because it is so unexpected. And yet it should not be. One of the things we all need to say to ourselves is that “anything which can happen to a human can happen to me.” Life does not come with any guarantees. For those of us who are Christians the life of Jesus makes this clear. We follow the one who we believe fulfilled God’s perfect will at every moment of his life but who was “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”

"One cannot get through life without pain.  What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us." If our the times of pain and sorrow in our life become times when we draw closer to God the those times of pain and sorrow will be times of growth for us as they were for God’s people long ago.

...those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.