NOTES for Isa 40:1-11

Through the prophet Isaiah the Lord calls His people to be comforted, yet He leaves 99 sheep in the mountains for the sake of one that has gone astray. The Lord "comes with might, and His arm rules," yet He takes the lambs in His arms and carries them at His breast.

These are not contradictions, although it may appear that community does not go hand in hand with individuality, or strength with tenderness. But the Lord shepherds the whole flock - the Church; it is all His body. And at the same time He died for each of us, and even if only one person remained on earth, the Lord would still have died for him on the Cross and, dying, would have looked at him with love and tenderness.

The Lord conquers our enemies with a strong hand, yet He also supports us if we stumble and carries us in His arms if we no longer have the strength to walk. But the most astonishing thing is that we are His children, and He calls us to the same thing: to be strong in weakness, to support, comfort, and strengthen the weak, and humbly allow ourselves to be comforted in weakness and sorrow; to live together, love one another, be the one Body of Christ - the Church, and personally answer for ourselves before God, standing firmly before Him in our individuality and trying to become again what He created us to be.

For us, the Bible is a word of consolation. People opening it for the first time most often say that it is a book about cruelty, vengeance, and the inevitability of punishment. But it is enough to make an effort and you will hear what God says to the human person, and how and what He taught His people. He says, "And all flesh shall see the salvation of God." All flesh: that is, no one is rejected, there are no better and worse people, no righteous and sinners; He offers salvation to everyone. When we read this text and the parable of the one lost sheep, we can understand this apparent injustice of merciful love. He seeks everyone, even when the others feel that they have been abandoned to their fate. When the one being sought is you, lost and thirsting for salvation, this is understandable and obviously right. It is harder to admit that for the moment you can wait while another person is found.

What can comfort persecuted people, who lost and their country and their saints? The promise for a new life, in which everything will still be as before? Perhaps. But such promise will hardly delight a spiritually mature person: indeed, it is impossible for such person not to understand that, if the new life is the same as was the former life, it will then also end so disastrously, as ended the former life.

Such a person can please not the return unto the past, no matter how much this past may seem happy from far, but an onward movement, which is unthinkable without spiritual renewal. It is not accidentally if the main comfort of the people turns out to be the news that their committed sin is forgiven, and its consequences are redeemed, such that now before them opens the possibility of a new life on the land of the ancestors, on which they can now return.

Before, the return on this land would have become the return to the past; now it will become a step to the future, to the future, where there will be many spiritual discoveries and revelations, to the messianic future, about which had already spoken the prophets before the period of captivity.

Without spiritual renewal the return in Judea would have been an undeserved reward, not bringing either joy, or benefits. After the renewal the return became the crown, which found his winner and the beginning of a new history of the people, who after the historic disaster that reached them, seemed to be condemned to disappearance and oblivion.

This beginning of the Book of Consolation of the prophet Isaiah, predicting the liberation of Israel from the Babylonian captivity, and moreover, as usual in the prophetic books, and several more things. And the first image that he uses, is so clear and evident insomuch that another prophet John the Baptist, will quote it in his sermon. Indeed, imagine yourselves: God goes to a hilly wilderness separating the Promised Land and Babylon, to fulfill the new Exodus, and He sends forward His crier so that people may prepare the way, worthy for the King of Kings.

It is interesting, how refracted these words were in the consciousness of people afterward: the punctuation is put in another place, after the word "wilderness", and the meaning has changed. “Voice of him that crieth in the wilderness” – it is when someone shouts, and no one listens. It was not like that with Isaiah, neither with John. Why the accent was so moved? Certainly, because in Christians time people began naturally to interpret these words in the spiritual sense: God goes towards each of us to save us from sin and death, but in order that He enters our heart, confession and the correction of our life (" to prepare the way") are necessary, and here is where is shown our "deafness", and whoever call us to confession, find himself in emptiness...

The image of the Messiah as shepherd appears often in Isaiah's preaching, and also in that of other prophets. In the Gospel, Jesus too often speaks of Himself as the good shepherd. Today this image may seem somewhat humiliating to us, for if we follow the logic of the image, we must feel ourselves to be sheep and rams. Not a very pleasant association. Meanwhile, in antiquity sheep and rams, and domestic animals generally, were viewed somewhat differently, especially in societies that grew out of a pastoral, nomadic tradition.

Of course, there could be nothing like the sentimentality toward domestic animals sometimes found today. But there was something else: responsibility for the whole flock and for each sheep in it. Both in the prophets and in Jesus Himself we often meet the image of a bad shepherd, for whom the flock is only a source of income, food, and wool, and who cares nothing for the sheep. Such a shepherd merely uses the flock as a thing, and in case of danger, for example an attack by predators, immediately abandons it: his own life is worth more than the income.

The real, good shepherd loves his sheep. Not as equals, of course, but even God cannot love us as equals: we are not equal to Him by definition and never will be. But we are His, and if so, then above all He is responsible for us and loves us, and does not simply use us to solve His tasks in this world. With us, of course, it is in many ways more complicated for Him than even for a good shepherd with his sheep: unlike sheep, we possess free will, which God has to take into account. And possessing it, we can always do something no ram would ever think of.

But His love for us remains unchanged, just as a good shepherd loves his flock and every sheep in it, even one that is not very obedient and for that reason sometimes has to be searched for throughout the area. And he rejoices over such a sheep more than over all the rest of the flock. Because a good shepherd feels responsible for every sheep. And loves every one as well. Just as the Messiah loves each of us. And for this reason becomes our good shepherd.