For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 5 – Isaiah 55:10-13 (related)

It is almost universally accepted that the book which we call ‘Isaiah’ comes from three different authors and three different periods. The middle section, which today’s lection draws to a close, runs from chapters 40 – 55, and comes from the time close to the end of the exile, when after a period of letting his people stew and reflect on their unfaithfulness, God is finally going to comfort them, assure them that their sin has been paid for, and bring them home to Jerusalem. Having heard this message, the exiles, I would imagine, must have had mixed feelings. Relief, of course, particularly because of those six words with which this section (‘Deutero- or Second Isaiah’) begins: ‘Comfort my people says your God’. That phrase reflects the covenant deal which comes time and again throughout the OT – ‘You shall be my people and I will be your God’. The pronouns which the prophet uses here are vital. They emphasise, to a nation who no doubt felt that they had really blown it with God this time, and broken the covenant once and for all, that in fact the deal is still on. My people, your God. Phew – what a relief! Is there nothing we can do to offend God so much that he simply abandons us? Not according to this prophet.

But I wonder whether there was another side to the people’s reaction: we’ll believe that when we see it! Hope deferred, says Proverbs 13, makes the heart grow sick. When we suffer so much, and for so long, we really can abandon hope, and every promise of God’s goodness and redemption simply serves to rub our noses in our pain and distress. Cynicism is the sickness of heart which can so easily result. Singing those dreadful worship-songs in church, all about how good and wonderful God is, can be profoundly painful when that simply isn’t your experience. So perhaps just as the prophet began his work with words of comfort, he ends with words of assurance for the downtrodden and cynical. How can we believe these words? Answer: because they are God’s words, and they have power behind them.

The prophet uses a poem which attacks our senses to make the point as strongly and as emotionally as he can. We can feel the cool rain and the freezing snow, even in Babylon in the middle of a desert. We can smell the fragrance of seeds sprouting from damp earth, and of the baking bread, and we can almost taste it in our mouths. And when you are set free from your slavery, says the prophet, all creation is going to line the route home to cheer you on your way. Picture piles on top of picture as abundance surrounds the broken and dispirited people on their way back to their homeland. How can this ‘word’ be trusted? Simply because God said it. It is going to happen, and indeed so it did.

But before we all get carried away, spare a thought for today’s Gospel, the parable of the sower. Again there is a picture of abundance, with up to 100-fold return, but that isn’t the whole story. For Isaiah God’s word is effective full stop. But for Jesus’ sower it all depends on the soil. And there is one of the big paradoxes of the Christian faith. We have an almighty, all-powerful God who rules the universe and can do anything he likes, who simply speaks new things into existence. And yet he chooses to allow himself to be limited by us humans. He doesn’t always get his way: he wouldn’t have told us to pray ‘Your kingdom come’ if it was simply automatic. For those who suffer, who find themselves in all kinds of exiles, we have to live with the purposes of God, which he promises will surely come to pass, not happening because of human sin and rebellion. This paradox might drive us to despair, but it certainly ought to drive us to fervent prayer.