To comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable… Have you ever heard this phrase before?
The phrase has its origins in muckraking journalism, more than a century ago. Muckrakers went into the corridors of power and privilege and wrote exposés of the corruption they found there. They decried the injustices of their time—child labor, unsafe working conditions, political graft, and the like.
The broadsheet newspaper was the most powerful form of social media in those days, lending to the investigative reporter enormous clout. He was a voice for the underdog and the underprivileged. He wrote pieces that the turned the tide of public opinion against the powerful and politically connected, forcing social change.
In this sense, the investigative reporter—or muckraker—comforted the afflicted, and afflicted the comfortable.
But it is not the reporter who is commissioned and set apart to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, at least not in an eminent sense. It is the preacher. And why the preacher? Because the preacher is commissioned to proclaim the gospel, the good news.
There is power in the gospel. “I am not ashamed of the gospel,” exclaimed perhaps the greatest of all preachers, the Apostle Paul, “for it is the power of God that brings salvation to all those who believe” (Rom. 1:17).
To the gospel belongs the power to encourage those who are down. To the gospel belongs the power to comfort those who mourn, to restore to them joy and gladness. To the gospel belongs the power to give new life to those who are dead.
“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God” (Isa. 40:1). The prophet Isaiah is the preacher of the gospel to God’s people. He is relaying to the people what God has instructed him to do.
The role of the prophets in Israel was to warn the God’s people of impending judgment. But it was also to support them in times of adversity, in the hard times, so that they might not be discouraged.
This is one of those times. The people have been languishing in captivity in Babylon, exiled from their homeland. Understandably, they felt abandoned by God! We hear their distress in the Psalms: “We do not see your signs; there is no who knows or who can tell us how long!” (Psalm 74:9).
But God’s faithful love for his people prevents him from abandoning them to their misery, from neglecting them in their need, from ignoring their cries.
“Speak tenderly to Jerusalem; cry to her that she has served her term…” (Isa. 40:2). The original Hebrew here employs a military metaphor. Her time in captivity is compared to a war, at the end of which the soldiers, having obtained an honorable discharge, will return home to enjoy peace and rest. There will be a homecoming.
A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isa. 40:3).
It will happen. For the Word of God has decreed it. And there is nothing in heaven or on earth that can contradict God’s word. Even the most powerful among us humans are like the grass that withers, like a flower that fades. God’s Word, however, stands forever.
For this reason, as John Calvin writes:
We ought to find comfort nowhere else but in God. Nothing that is firm and durable will be found on the earth. Nobody will attain perfect happiness until he has reached out to God, in order that he may know that life flows to us from him.
And yet there are obstacles that prevent us from receiving the good news, that obstruct this flow of life from God to us. There are mountains. We may see our problems as mountains. Our language implies this metaphor, as when we say: “I will never surmount these difficulties in my life. They are too great. I cannot measure up against them.”
But Scripture reassures us that God leads his people over the mountains, through the steep places.
Listen to how the Psalmist celebrates the triumphs that God gave to him: “It is God who arms me with strength, who keeps my way secure. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer. He causes me to stand on the mountain heights” (Ps. 18:32-33).
Because of his God, the Psalmist is not buried beneath his problems, but stands above them.
What about us? Are there any among you whose problems are so overwhelming that you neither see nor hear anything else? Do you feel buried beneath them?
Isaiah tells us that God makes low the mountains and the hills. That is to say, God removes the obstacles, so that we can hear and receive a word from him that comforts us, that gives us hope.
Again, Calvin writes:
To believers here there is an invaluable comfort, that though for a time they are oppressed by grief and sorrow, yet because they hope in God, who is the Father of all comfort, they will know by experience the promise of his grace, which will cheer their hearts at the proper time.
God also has words of comfort through Isaiah to those who feel low, who live in the valley, amid the dark shadows—the valley of the shadows of death, as Psalm 23 puts it.
Many of us can probably relate. The darkness of winter has been descending on us. For many of us winter is a dreary and disheartening time. That is why we have snowbirds among us, as well as those who envy them, because we wish we could with them!
Our Christian forbearers coped with the dark days by marking the first increase of sunlight with a religious observance: Christmas. “Christ is the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:1-5).
He is “the light that illuminates life with the love of the Father.”
Preachers today need to learn how to spread new and surprising glimmers of the light of Christ in the church and in the darkness of the world (Pope Francis).
In any event, the observance of Christmas just after the winter solstice was—and continues to be—a reminder that the darkness is not endless. The sun would return again.
In our world today, another type of darkness has been descending on us, one that is no less frightening despite its cyclicality. We refer here to the shadow of war and death. It is a shadow of dehumanizing hatred, a shadow of intergenerational trauma, one that has leapt out lately in mass killings of ordinary civilians using weapons of war.
The unspeakable atrocities perpetrated against them have eroded the hope of many, leaving them in a state of anguish, of powerlessness and fear. Walking through the valley of the shadow of death well describes the feeling of many.
But listen to the words that the preacher proclaims today: every valley shall be lifted up…the uneven ground shall become level… and the rough places a plain.
For his part, the prophet is summoned by God to go up out of the valley to a high mountain to preach the good news. For that is the place from which the good news ought to be preached.
Scripture refers to him as a “herald of good tidings.” This translation in fact obscures what he is literally. In the original he is literally “preacher of the gospel.” Indeed, when Bible students try to determine the sources of the word “gospel” in the New Testament, they look here at Isaiah 40:9!
And what is the sum and substance of this gospel? “Here is your God!” The meaning of this statement will not be realized fully until God comes decisively to ransom captive Israel. Immanuel—God with us.
How much more so then, will he be revealed to his people as the good shepherd, attentive to each of his sheep, to treat it according to its capacity, supporting especially the one that is weak?
He will be kind, gentle, and compassionate, and will not drive the weak harder than they can bear, but rather feed the multitudes of them and give them rest.
Here it is appropriate to point out that the Prophet Isaiah encourages the people to entertain better and better hopes.
For that is how prophecy in the Old Testament works. It invites us to see how it points beyond the immediate circumstances to which it addresses itself to an even greater future for the people of God.
And we see this greater future unfold in our Gospel lesson. There we find the word “good news” or “gospel” again. And here we read about another preacher, whose name is John.
And John receives the same commission as did his predecessor before him. “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.” He is the voice of which Isaiah spoke as crying out in the wilderness.
John goes ahead of the Lord, that is, Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. And so that there is no mistaking him, Mark adds that he was clothed with camel’s hair and a leather belt.
Attentive readers of the Bible will remember the episode where the ailing King Ahaziah asks about the man his messengers met on the road. When they replied that he was a hairy man, with a leather belt around his waist, he exclaimed: “Is it Elijah?” (2 Kings 1:8).
Mark wants his readers to respond in the same way. “Is it Elijah?” John is to be seen in the role of Elijah, the prophet who did not really die, and who was expected to return before the Day of the Lord as the forerunner of the Messiah, according to the book of Malachi.
John too speaks of a way and of a path. But he is referring to the paths made straight in human hearts: It is the disposition of the heart to repentance and faith that renders it receptive to the One John is proclaiming.
That is what we see in those who throng to him from the whole Judean countryside and Jerusalem to be baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. The people are hungry. They sense that something important is here and that they need to be a part of it. They are hopeful as they commit themselves to John’s baptism (Chelsea Harmon).
Parenthetically, this helps us to understand why Advent has been called “winter Lent.” John the Baptist reminds us that it is a time of spiritual preparation, a time of acknowledging and confessing the sins and the anxieties that keep us in those lonely desert places, preoccupied with our problems, absorbed in our own concerns.
Advent calls us to join together with all those people from Jerusalem and the whole Judean countryside who move through those desert places to John in their desire for repentance and renewal.
There must have been something about John, about his message, that compelled all those people to come out. But what he was and did was not an end in itself. John points to Jesus.
It’s about him that he is speaking when he confesses that the one who comes after him is more powerful than he is. And that is saying something. Jesus himself later said that until his time no one greater than John had been born to women.
But if John is not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of Jesus’ sandal, how much greater is Jesus than John!
Jesus is the stronger one. The God whom the preachers proclaim is the One who liberates. He liberated his people from their captivity in Babylon. But this points to an even greater liberation.
For, as we will see throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus liberates people from the greatest of their enemies—sin, sickness, death, and the devil.
He is stronger not only in relation to John; he is stronger in relation to all these. He is the stronger one able to enter into the house of the strong man, bind him up, and plunder his goods, as we read in Mark 3.
The house of this world has been occupied by darkness and death. Jesus comes to evict these occupants and reclaim human lives and human society for God’s reign, for God’s kingdom.
This is the good news with which the preachers are entrusted, both then and even today. This is the good news that the preachers are commissioned to preach, both then and now.
May we open our afflicted hearts to receive it, so that, in receiving it, we may experience the comfort that only such news can bring. Amen.