Isaiah 40
Have you ever been frightened? Not just mildly upset, but truly frightened, so that your heart rate rapidly increases, and your adrenalin starts pumping and you are ready for flight? That your fear really increases and your feeling of dread gets larger and larger. And you fear for the very worst from some situation over which you have little control. [Talk to your neighbour for a couple of short minutes about how it felt.]
Worse still, imagine what it must feel like to be forced to leave your own country, and marched away to a foreign land where all the customs are different, the weather is not the same and where everyone speaks a different language. Imagine that you have been defeated in a war or some other conflict and you have been forced to move. Imagine for a moment what those Chinese immigrants must have felt on Morecambe Bay beach as the rising tide left them completely stranded, with no possibility of escape, and having to pay the price of their work with their own lives.
Difficult scenes. Difficult times. Difficult moments.
I realised for a fleeting few moments recently what it must feel like to be illiterate, and to be a stranger and an outsider, as I walked down the road in a Chinese city of 15 million, with no English signs anywhere and everything, road signs, street names, shops, goods, transport and so on, in Chinese characters. I can only recall the two symbols, which mean Exit, so it proved quite unnerving. Frightening. Scary. Terrifying if lost. I made sure I knew where I was and whom I was with. And I kept sight of them all the time. I wouldn’t even go to the bank on my own to exchange money, in case I became lost. Silly really.
It was much worse, of course, for the Israelites, the subject of our text from Isaiah. Living in Jerusalem, a generation or so before Isaiah writes, the country had been laid waste by the Babylonians in the sixth century. In 587 BCE, the leaders of the kingdom of Judah had been forced into exile from their beloved Jerusalem, to Babylon. All that they stood for, all their hopes, all their trust in God seemed to be completely shattered. The Temple, built by Solomon was a smouldering ruin, and they found themselves eventually many miles from home in a strange land, with strange customs, and everything familiar taken away. No wonder the writer of the psalm 137 was able to ponder during that time of exile, “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion, and how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
In their despair, they fell silent, as we often do in times of great crisis, and when we think or feel abandoned by God. For it’s a universal experience.
The Israelites felt deeply that God had abandoned them, though they were later to reinterpret all their history in terms of this Exile from their homeland, as a judgement of God on their communal life. The experience forced them to some fundamental re-thinking about how they lived their life in relation to God. A testing time.
Out of all this misery and the depths of despair in exile in Babylon, hope began to stir, when the Persian king Cyrus, who many later came to be seen as the liberator and redeemer, around the year 520 BCE, decided to send the exiled Jews back to Israel. To rebuild Jerusalem. To start again.
The wonderful words of our opening recitative and aria from Handel’s Messiah, offer to bring hope and light to abandoned people. God is coming to be with his people. He will shepherd the flock; he will be the Creator who controls the nations; God alone will have power; he will give strength to the weak and the weary.
It’s instructive to note that when Handel wrote this mighty work, in the summer of 1741, he was feeling demoralized and thinking of leaving England for good. His last two operas had been dismal failures; he was ill and in debt. At this difficult time, two things happened to him that changed all that. The Duke of Devonshire, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, invited Handel to make a visit to Dublin, and the flamboyant and gifted librettist, Charles Jennens sent him a libretto entitled Messiah. In the three weeks that followed, between August 22 and September 14, Handel composed one of the world’s best-loved oratorios, and, when it was performed the next April in Dublin, it was a spectacular success. In line with Handel’s own sympathy and support for the poor, the Messiah was performed in aid of charity.
Out of Handel’s own sense of abandonment and despair, new life and new beginnings were to follow. The progression from despair to hope, captivity to freedom, death to life, an integral part of the Isaiah tradition from where Jennens mined most of the words, cannot be divorced from Handel’s own personal circumstances. The overture, perhaps by convention designed to do little more than attract people to their seats and to gain their attention, becomes in this oratorio a theme of mood without hope. A slow sighing mournful elegy, followed by an allegro passage which expresses the violent, fruitless upward striving of the oppressed. It is hard, says one writer, to imagine a more perfect, more appropriate context of the opening words of Isaiah 40, Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God.
I’d like to tell you about a young lad whose story and whose life I have stumbled across recently. He is an American, and though he is not terribly well behaved and has caused rather too many problems around the place, he is not wicked. Adopted at an early age, his parents moved to Britain and then split up, the adoptive mother moving to Australia and the adoptive father remaining here. He was sent from one to the other, eventually returning to live with the father here. One day, after a particularly difficult time with the young man, the father drove him to the nearest town, stopped, opened the door of the car, told his son to get out, and then left him, saying that he never wanted to see him again, and that from now on, he was on his own. The young man had no means of support, no permission to remain in Britain, nowhere to live and was therefore unable to find work. Abandoned, and found sleeping rough, after a couple of days, a local family took him in for the time being, until that is, the authorities caught up with him, told him that he could no longer remain in Britain and would have to be returned to that part of America where he was born. He knows no one there. The authorities will look after him unto he is 18, and then he is, once again, on his own. He is being sent back to America next week.
His sense of abandonment must run very deep, and it must be very difficult for him to trust anyone, let alone see much point in life.
There are times to when we all feel abandoned by God, when all seems pointless, and all we see is a dark future.
Lent is a good time to take a deep look at our values, our lives, our attitudes, but above all our relationships with each other and with God. We can take heart from the words of Isaiah, so movingly set to music by Handel. Every valley may then be exalted; the rough places of our lives made plain, the way made straight.
Ours is a God who yearns for companionship, for that deep fellowship of which our earthly relationships are but a glimpse, but a foretaste of the glory to come.
Our way back to God will be made straight, if we take that first step towards God. Then we too can take comfort. For God is there, waiting for us, waiting for that reconciliation which comes from the penitent and repentant person. His grace is overwhelming. It will take us by surprise. We will have come home.