Comfort

 

Here’s a handy question for a table quiz. 

What word does Handel’s Messiah start with? 

And the answer is ….  ‘comfort’. 

The overture begins with sweeping strings, and then the tenor’s voice “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.” 

The Hebrew words in the Bible sound even more melodic and soothing “Na-hammu, na-hammu, ammi.”

Drawn from Isaiah’s text, out of the mouth of God, it sounds at variance with the idea one might have of Yahweh.

Majestic, powerful yes, just and fair yes, but comforting..?

Yet, this is at the heart of the idea of the Judaeo-Christian God, and thus introduces Handel’s masterful presentation of the narrative of God as the one who saves the world through His Messiah.

He has an intensely personal, and intentional relationship with this world He has created, both with the peoples who inhabit it, and with individuals like ourselves

He is the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our troubles. 

That is so unlike the gods of ancient Greece (I’ve been dipping into Homer’s Iliad), whose interventions with mankind appear to spring from caprice, jealousy, even selfishness.

Also unlike the idea of God we get from any other religious world view where God appears distant and aloof. 

But the very reason this God can and does give comfort is that He is Almighty, majestic, in control, and has a plan and purpose in every circumstance that happens, no matter how awful - a plan that will find its glorious fulfilment at the end of time.

Which is why, I sense, that there is such a growing attraction toward the God of the Bible in the Farsi speaking world, both among Afghan and Iranian men and women.

And how in need of God’s comfort, that region of the world is just now.

So, as I, personally, find comfort, in a God who I know is in control of my own relatively minor circumstances, may He also give comfort to those dear people, whether friends of ours living in Athens and aching for their relatives and friends of whom they have not heard, or living in Kabul, and passing each day in fear of their very lives and futures.