“Comfort, give comfort to my people, says the Lord.” These are the first words of the Book of Consolation of the Prophet Isaiah. It was 70 years after Babylon had destroyed Jerusalem and carried off the people into exile to live as an underclass in what is now Iraq. During those 70 years God had sent prophets to encourage the people, like Jeremiah who told the exiles to settle down and to have children and be engaged in business, and to pray for the government that had conquered them. Essentially, make do with what you have, and do not lose your hope that better times will come when we can all return to the Promised Land.
Now, says Second Isaiah, now the time has come, now that Persia has conquered our old enemy Babylon, and we can return to Jerusalem, now is the time to “comfort, give comfort to My people.”
You see, there is a cycle of how things go: things are Ok until we make some bad choices, or lots of us make bad choices. Those choices have ramifications and the result is that we go through hard times. Some call this punishment, but one could also say that it’s just the way things happen, what goes around comes around. Then after enduring the result of our bad choices, we come to our senses and decide to stop with the bad choices and get back to the basics on how to live a good life.
Then comes a renewal, a renaissance, a conversion, a time of salvation, a breakthrough into a better way of life, a period of wisdom to savor what is worthwhile and discard what is worthless.
In religion we call this the Pascal Mystery, the pattern of life, death and resurrection.
Our first reading today comes at that moment of getting our minds around the act of salvation, the time of redemption from the suffering caused by our poor choices. Though this is a time of comfort and sheer joy, it is also a time of reckoning called “the day of the Lord” as we heard described in Second Peter. The time we are living in is not yet the day of the Lord, nor the moment of giving comfort. Unless, of course, we take the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ seriously. In that case, it is always time to be comforted by the rhythm of the Pascal Mystery, it is always the time of conversion.
The “day of the Lord” is that moment when God will usher in the wholesale implementation of justice that brings about the settling of unsettled scores, reparations for deeds of injustice, retribution against all the forces of evil, and that time when justice and peace shall kiss.
This “day of the Lord” could also be seen as the day of judgment. So, when we look around and see all the injustices of our time, it takes faith to believe that they will be righted. The temptation, of course, is to give in to the spirit of doom and vexation over how bad things are. Yes, the top rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Yes, college graduates leave college with immense debts and little chance of getting a job. Yes, the deeds of darkness are now being shouted from the housetops as we hear of one mind-boggling scandal after another. Some days don’t you find yourself wanting to say, “Maranatha. Come Lord. Do not delay. Bring on the Day of the Lord. Save your people, Lord, for we are sinking.”
Yet, what does the Lord say to us? “The Lord does not delay his promise, as some regard ‘delay,’ but he is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”
So, then, it makes sense, doesn’t it, for John the Baptist to come onto our scene, calling us to repentance.
Oh, but we all think of ourselves as our own saviors. Somehow we think: if I just get more disciplined, if I only get more determined, if I can just make more money, if I can just get through this rough patch in our family life, if, if, if. Meanwhile the minds slides to distractions, decisions are made to stave off the oncoming train wreck, to delay the day of reckoning to another congress, or another generation, or another this or that.
Anything but aligning our lives with Christ Jesus. John the Baptist was fabulously popular. People would leave their city life and go way out into the wilderness for days at a time to listen to this strange man calling them to repent. But when the extent of the change that he was calling everyone to became applicable to the powers that be, he wound up martyred for his witness to the truth. Before that happened, he was able to point out the true savior and introduced him as “the Lamb of God,” as the one who was going to be sacrificed for the sins of all. He pointed the way to the One and Only who could save us from our plight, whose sandals, John said, I am unworthy even to stoop and unfasten. He is the only One who can make justice and peace kiss. He is the only One who can bring on the Day when justice and comfort come together as they do in today’s Scriptures. It’s like coming to know one’s sin with great contrition and the Lord’s forgiveness and mercy. Yes, in Him justice and peace shall kiss.
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