by CCW | 27 February 2018 21:00
“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God.” So begins the fortieth chapter of The Book of the Prophet Isaiah. It marks the beginning of what has come to be called The Book of Consolation comprising chapters forty through fifty-five of The Book of Isaiah. From the outset we may note the connection between comfort and consolation. In short, this section of The Book of Isaiah, also sometimes called Deutero-Isaiah, belongs to our consideration of the Comfortable Words and the literature of consolation.
The literature of consolation is a great collection of writings that deal in one way or another with the question of how we face loss and suffering. There are many examples ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Homer – one thinks of Achilles consoling Priam on the loss of his son, Hector, in The Iliad – from Sophocles’ Chorus in Electra to the letters of Seneca, Plutarch and Cicero, from some of The Psalms of David to Augustine, not to mention one of the great classics of consolation, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. All of these contribute in one way or another to later works of consolation, particularly in terms of mystical theology.
The Book of Consolation in Isaiah appears to deal with the fortunes of the people of Israel close to the time of the ending of their exile in Babylon. In the Jewish perspective, any political change of fortune is really about God’s power and grace. Thus The Book of Consolation highlights the idea of God restoring his people, comforting them in terms of strengthening them theologically, we might say, with respect to the majesty of God, on the one hand, and the compassion of God towards Israel, on the other hand. The last chapter of this section of Isaiah, for instance, emphasizes the distance between God and man. “For my thoughts and not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” This strong sense of the difference between God and man is a critical theme and is the condition for the grounding of our lives in the will of God. For immediately before that passage, Isaiah exhorts us in ways that anticipate the Comfortable Words of our liturgy.
Seek the Lord while he may be found,
call upon him while he is near,
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
Let him return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon (Isaiah 55.5-9).
Such words anticipate the Comfortable Words and underscore the point that consolation is found in our being returned to truth, to God, to a principle which greater than our experiences and our suffering.
This in no way diminishes the reality of suffering and sin; in fact, it heightens it, makes it even more intense. Such is the dialectic, one might say, between joy and sorrow. We are turned back to God in whom we find our joy and the truth of our being. But we are turned back through the awareness of our own alienation and separation from God, not just through “the valley of the shadow of death,” as Psalm 23 so wonderfully envisions, but through the contemplation of human sin and evil. The reality of sin and suffering is part and parcel of the consolation. The extraordinary idea is that consolation is found in the suffering itself, a suffering which in some sense becomes redemptive. God and God alone makes something good out of evil.
An important feature of The Book of Consolation relates more or less directly to the Christian pilgrimage of Lent and especially the intensity of Holy Week. In The Book of Consolation there are four famous ‘Servant Songs’ that have become associated with the sufferings of Christ and are embedded in our liturgy and hymns. The four Servant Songs in Isaiah are about Israel and about Israel’s vocation. Israel’s sufferings are seen to be redemptive not just for Israel but for all people.
Israel is to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” for instance, words in the first Servant Song which are later associated with Christ in the story of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. Israel exists to make known the will and purpose of God for the whole of our humanity even in and through the experience of suffering and abuse as in the third Servant Song. “I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting” (Isaiah 50.6). There is suffering and yet in the suffering there is comfort and strength. “For the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been confounded … he who vindicates me is near” (Isaiah 50.7,8). There is victory in the suffering. The application of this imagery to Christ as the man of sorrows proved irresistible to the Christian Church, indeed the phrase derives from the Fourth Servant Song.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53.3).
Christians found in the Deutero-Isaiah’s Book of Consolation a way to think more profoundly and deeply about the significance and meaning of Christ’s crucifixion. The consolation in The Book of Consolation is about the divine love for our humanity in the face of our sin and wickedness which alienates us from God’s love.
“But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me, ” words which suggest Christ’s words of dereliction on the Cross. Zion here refers to Jerusalem as a shorthand for Israel restoration. The passage continues with a beautiful and powerful rhetorical question which answers this sense of grief and abandonment.
“Can a woman forget her sucking child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.
Behold I have graven you on the palms of my hands.” (Isaiah 49. 14-16)
Consolation is about our being graven on the palms of God’s hands. Such is the divine love made known through the realities of human suffering and misery, through the forms of our finiteness and more importantly through the forms of sin and evil.
We meet tonight in the commemoration of George Herbert, a 17th century poet and Anglican divine. In a poem called The Agonie, he illumines beautifully the consolation and comfort that belongs to our contemplation of Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion. It is really all about sin and love.
PHILOSOPHERS have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.”
Measuring mountains and fathoming the depths of seas suggests natural philosophy while fathoming the depths “of states, of kings,” points to political philosophy. Metaphysics is indicated in the idea of walking with a staff to heaven, the staff as a symbol of the teaching authority of philosophers. Here the idea is about thinking about the end and the beginning of all things. But then the argument shifts to religious and ethical philosophy. How to sound the depths and the heights of sin and love? Herbert’s poem takes us to the cross where we confront both our sins and divine love of God in Christ and are drawn into the redeeming love of God for us. “Love is that liquor sweet, and most divine,/ Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine,” alluding to the Christian Eucharist.
As with The Book of Consolation with the images of the Suffering Servant, there is a kind of intensity of feeling. We are meant to feel the force of the images and as such find a comfort and a consolation even in the midst of our struggles and experiences. Such is our comfort and consolation. It is found in our life in God in Christ. It is about our participation in the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday, February 27th, 2018
Comm. of George Herbert
The Comfortable Words & The Literature of Consolation II
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