“Comfort, comfort my people!” – with these words God calls us to comfort His nation in Babylonian captivity. What is a consolation? In the Holy Scripture it is never a downplaying of a difficult situation, an empty statement like: “Cheer up, it’s not that bad.” God, comforting a man, takes him in His arms, offers him closeness, binds his wounds, heals him, and stays with him in pain. God’s consolation is reconstruction, creation anew. The German theologian, Karl Rahner expressed it this way: “Consolation is for the believer the gift of experiencing that the love of God in Christ sustains every life, even those that seem to be astray or falling into ruin.” God, bringing comfort, enters the very center of human sadness and desperation, descends to the very bottom of our “pits” and awakens hope in us. He who is Emmanuel, God-with-us, strengthens us “when the nights are sleepless, when the days are powerless”, when “we scream, we are silent, we chase the dawn” (Peter du Chateau).
Every person needs consolation to gain new strength and not to escape from the helplessness of others. However, when comforting others, we experience all our helplessness and powerlessness. We are entering situations where not words, but silently staying with someone is the only and true consolation. We learn that there is no comfort in those who are prone to uttering platitudes that do not heal but hurt even more. The one who can truly console us is the one who, in the darkness, in the middle of “too night” (Peter du Chateau), saw the light of hope lit by God.
The prophet from today’s first reading found himself in a similar situation. God ordered him to preach words of comfort. We know that he followed this call, but he certainly had to carry with him the burden of the fragility of his own faith and the narrowness of his heart. What to do when, in the face of suffering, depression and doubt, words do not come out of our mouths? We must believe deeply that God also works through the imperfections of human words and gestures. This is rarely done in a spectacular way. God works most often in secret: in the privacy of our sensitive hearts. Advent announces that God who comforts comes to people in the person of Jesus Christ. He is all our comfort.