Sermon: Mattins - 4 May 2014

Preacher:

David Martin

Date:

Sunday 4th May 2014

Service:

Mattins

Readings:

Isaiah 40:1

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 21.2M)

+ Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God, speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished and her iniquity is pardoned. Isaiah chapter 40, verse 1.

This is one of the most evocative verses in the Bible, partly because it is the opening text of the great unknown prophet we call Second Isaiah, but mainly because it is the opening text of the world’s most frequently performed piece of sacred music, Handel’s Messiah. ‘Comfort ye my people’ opens Messiah as the first of several prophecies of Christ’s birth before the oratorio moves onto its central message in Part the Second:  a meditation on the Passion. The text makes a marvellous beginning to Advent but to have it now just after Easter feels like placing ‘Comfort ye’ just after the opening of Messiah Part the Third: ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’. I last heard this text in the German church in Jerusalem on the third Sunday of Advent, ‘Tröstet, Tröstet mein Volk’, which is where it most obviously belongs. So why do we now have it on the second Sunday of Easter? Sometimes the aim of the lectionary looks obvious. Today it looks as though its authors are setting us a puzzle. We have to look for clues.

The first clue comes from the words ‘Make straight in the desert a highway for our God’. Isaiah is looking back to the exodus of the people of God from slavery in Egypt. So what does that tell us? Well, we might first remember that Jesus began his Passion with the celebration of the Passover with its solemn recollection of the exodus. We might also recollect that the lessons for the Easter vigil, where we first announce the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, begin with the exodus of the people of God from slavery and from the hands of their enemies. As the people of God entered the sea and emerged on the other side so Jesus led his people through the sea of death and brought them to the shores of everlasting life. Moses sang a triumph song: ‘Sing ye to the Lord for he hath triumphed gloriously’. Handel’s only other scriptural work, Israel in Egypt,is an Easter oratorio beginning ‘The sons of Israel do mourn’ and ending ‘The Lord shall reign for ever and ever’.  Now the triumph song of the Exodus is complemented and completed by the triumph song of the Resurrection.

In his great Easter hymn ‘The Day of Resurrection’ St. John Chrysostom first picks up the theme of Passover and then moves on to the theme of crossing the sea of death: ‘From death to life eternal,/ From earth unto the sky/ Our Christ has brought us over/ With songs of victory’. Once the people of God have traversed the deadly sea they are on a journey to another country. They are en route. So Isaiah looks forward to a highway in the desert where ‘Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain’. He looks forward to the building of the king’s highway and the removal of everything that might impede the passage of God’s kingdom. In verse 11 he ends on a note of great tenderness: ‘He shall feed his flock like a shepherd... and shall gently lead those that are with young’.

There is another theme in this opening chapter of Deutero-Isaiah, and it completes the passage from slavery to liberation, from death to life. That theme is the new creation and the revelation of God’s presence with his people wherever they may be. The glory of the Lord trembles on the edge of going global. The image of Jerusalem migrates between the physical city and the universal city of God. In verse 5 of chapter40 Isaiah writes ‘And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed. And all flesh shall see it together.’ ‘O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion...Say unto the cities of Judah behold your God’.  We are back where we began: ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye’...‘Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem.’

Before we can bring out the relevance of our text for Easter we need some history. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and only a few of its inhabitants were left in the mournful purlieus of the city while the rest went into another exile in Babylon. One of the traumatised few who were left behind wrote the book of Lamentations which describes its utter desolation.  It is these texts that the Church recollects to express its own trauma of desolation on Holy Thursday as one by one the disciples abandon Christ, and all the lights are put out, including the light of Christ.

‘O vos omnes’: ‘O all you who pass by in the way, is it nothing to you? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.’ ‘The joy of our hearts is ceased; our dances are turned into mourning’. A traumatised Christian community in Jerusalem recalls the trauma of Israel and remembers its cry of anguish over Jerusalem: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn again to thy God’. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum’ If you want to hear the most heart-rending and profound expression of these texts then listen to the three lessons for tenebrae in Holy Week composed by François Couperin in 1714.

But then in the Old Testament there comes the turning point as the exile is ended and Jerusalem is about to be restored: ‘Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem... for her warfare is accomplished’. Just so in the New Testament there comes a moment when mourning turns into joy. The women who go early in the morning to anoint the body of the Lord confront the question ‘Whom do you seek in the sepulchre’ and receive the answer ‘He is not here; he is risen’. For Christians the warfare of the cross is finished and ‘this our exile’ is over as the lights are relit, the sun of righteousness defeats the dark, the path forward through the wilderness is made plain, the holy fire is rekindled, humankind begins its exodus from the  dominion of the lie,  and death itself is despoiled of its prey. As Charles Wesley wrote in one of his greatest hymns:

‘Christ whose glory fills the skies

Christ the true the only light

Sun of righteousness arise

Triumph o’er the shades of night’.

I am going now to quote part of what St. John Chrysostom preached in his paschal address for Easter Day over sixteen hundred years ago. This address was recited from memory by a monk in the darkness of Dachau concentration camp at a celebration of Easter without service books, or vestments except borrowed SS uniforms, immediately after the camp was relieved by American troops in April 1945:

‘The Master is generous and accepts the last even as the first.

He gives rest to him that comes in the eleventh hour

Even as he who laboured from the first.

He accepts the deed, and honours the intention.

Rich and poor, dance together,

You who fasted and you who did not fast, rejoice together,

The table is fully laden: let all enjoy it,

The calf is fatted: let none go away hungry.

Let none lament his poverty,

F or the universal kingdom is revealed,

Let none bewail his transgressions.

For the light of forgiveness has risen from the tomb’.

‘O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?

Christ is risen and you are overthrown,

Christ is risen and the demons are fallen,

Christ is risen and the angels rejoice,

Christ is risen and life reigns’.

Alleluia.