Comfort Food

 It turns out that we have been turning to the food of our childhood during lockdown with Cadbury and Mr.Kipling in the fore. We know the words “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people saith your God” from the first tenor recitative of Handel’s Messiah. For me this is one of those wonderful openings which sets off a world of sound and of anticipation for both the oratorio and of memories of listening in the past, live in Bath Abbey, and frequently on a frosty Sunday afternoon in late Advent when I am feverishly writing Christmas cards. Although this is chapter 40 of the book of Isaiah everything suggests that this is the beginning of another author usually called second Isaiah. He is writing to those in exile now -his readers had been taken into captivity in Babylon or maybe it had been their parents some forty years before and they remembered sadly and deeply the Jerusalem of the past.  Passages from Lamentations point to the feelings of their hearts:

“How deserted lies the city once so full of people

Bitterly she sleeps at night, tears are on her cheeks 

After affliction and hard labour, Judah has gone into exile 

The roads to Zion mourn

All the gateways are desolate her priests groan 

Her enemies looked at her and not laughed at her destruction” 

And into this come the first words of the prophet: “Comfort ye comfort ye my people.” Now our exiles had not turned to mini chocolate rolls or cupcakes but to the stories of the past. It is in their exile that the laws of Moses are codified, refined, respected and that the identity of Israel, (the people) is delineated. [Many years later - well very very many I observed that the Italians of New Jersey would become more Italian to my eyes than the natives of the country itself.]  And so a voice cries out:

“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God”

The wilderness or desert recalls instantly the wanderings of the Israelites, which for forty years were very far from straight - neither physically or spiritually - our tenro thought has other ideas:

“Every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain. “

This new exodus, foretold and which will come to pass will be direct and assured for as we have heard “The mouth of the Lord has spoken.” And there follows in our reading a pastoral completely comforting section:

“He will feed his flock like shepherds, he will gather his lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom and gently lead the mother sheep. 

But we know this is about more than comfort (neither Cadbury or Mr Kipling) it is also more than pastoral for it is another foretelling: the promise that we are in this advent season, in our time, waiting to celebrate, the coming of the great shepherd of the sheep.

Amen