Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all the people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (Isaiah 40:1-5, NRSV)
Have you ever traveled to a destination and said to yourself, “There’s no easy way to get there?” I have! When I first started driving to Ole Miss to go to college and then to go back for football games after I graduated, it was mostly two lane roads passing through small towns that seemed to have more stop lights than people. It was a slow and at times difficult drive.
But it was a great and glorious time indeed when Interstates 269 and 22 were completed in 2018. Now, only thirty minutes of my drive is on a two-lane road. I don’t have to drive through small towns and there are only two traffic lights between my house in Murfreesboro and Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford.
You may recall that Isaiah spends the first 39 chapters of the book attributed to him telling the people that they need to repent and turn back to God. Guess what? They didn’t. As a result, God allowed the Israelites to be defeated by the Babylonians, who then took the defeated people of Israel into exile.
Today’s scripture is addressed to this defeated and exiled Israel. God sends a heavenly host to speak tenderly to them, to tell them that they have paid dearly for their sins and that they have now served their sentence. They might have assumed that the way back to God wouldn’t be easy, that it would be a winding road with lots of twists and turns and lots of starts and stops along the way. But that’s not the way the grace of God works.
Isaiah describes a highway being built between Babylon and Jerusalem. What could have been a long and difficult journey back to God has been made easier than they could have ever imagined. That’s how badly God wants God’s children to come home.
Does this sound like what God did on that first Christmas? When we turned away, when our love failed, God’s love remained steadfast and God made a way for us to come back.
Have we been on roads that have taken us far away from God? May God grant us the grace to find the highway back to God during this Advent season.