Advent XVI (A Season of Hope)

To read the Old Testament lesson assigned to the Third Sunday in Advent is to be enveloped by words which sound like heaven.  They were first spoken to the Hebrew people when they were exiled in Babylon.  They had eaten the dust of servitude and endured long days and nights of suffering at the hands of their oppressors.  So many of those who remembered Jerusalem had died and those who had managed to survive knew it mostly from the stories told by the old timers who had walked the road of oppression when they were young.  Seventy years is a long time.  It is long enough for people like the Hebrews to give up hope.   

It is to such a. people that Isaiah speaks the words of comfort and hope which are found in the 35th chapter of the book which bears his name.  In poetic beauty he speaks of the hard way which had been walked from Jerusalem to Babylon as a way which would not only receive them on the journey home, but would blossom in abundance and rejoice with joy.  (Isaiah 35:1). The way home will heal instead of destroy. The desert sand shall break forth in pools of water.  Danger and harm will not travel that road and at its end "sorrow and sighing shall flee away."  (Isaiah 35:5-10).  

Let us not forget that though Advent is a hard and somber season filled with visions of the Lord returning to judge and restore, it is a season of hope.  It is a season that gives us hope that the evil which seems to run rampant in our day shall be no more.  It s a season which gives us hope that injustices will be made right and sorrow will be turned into joy.  It is a season which gives us hope that the Hope of all nations will come and turn battlefields into lush rich gardens filled with harvest.  As this ancient prophecy of Isaiah fed the hope of suffering Israel, may it do so for us in these hard days in which we live.