My mother spent the last four years of her life mostly with me. She would come to visit for six months and return home for a couple of months and come back to visit. She was already very sick during the last Christmas she spent with me in 2003. Six years after surgery to remove a large portion of a brain tumor, her health had deteriorated. I took her home after that last Christmas.

Three weeks later I returned to the States, fully aware that I would need to go back home soon when the Lord called her to himself. I was at the airport on the way home when she died. She was surrounded by my two brothers and two sisters. My youngest sister Rosita was very close to my mother, and she had a very hard time when she died. When I arrived home, my younger brother told me that he had spent a long time trying to comfort my sister.

Giving comfort to people who suffer is always difficult. It seems that the comfort we try to provide is always insufficient. Complete comfort comes from someone who can offer it in perfection. In that case, God almighty is the true comforter of all humans.

Today’s first reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah portraits God as the comforter of the people of Israel. The prophet is in Babylon along with the people who have been in exile. The excerpt from the book of the prophet is the exact moment when God announced to his people that they would soon be brought back to the Promised Land.

God well knew how painful the exile experience had been for them. They felt completely abandoned by God. Without the three things that made them the people of God, namely, the Promised Land, the King, and the Temple of Jerusalem, they believed that they had ceased to exist. The prophet Isaiah came to announce the good news of an imminent redemption. “Go up on to a high mountain, Zion, herald of glad tidings; cry out at the top of your voice, Jerusalem, herald of good news”.  The initial words of God’s message are simply lovely: “Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem”. One of the chief tasks of God is to comfort his people. In Babylon, God performed this task perfectly.

The comfort offered there foreshadowed the comfort that the Good Shepherd, our Lord, would offer to his disciples and to the Church. In many parts of the gospels, we find the Lord comforting his disciples and many other people. One place where this is in perfect and full display is at the Last Supper. There the Lord discloses the truth about what was about to happen: one of the disciples would betray him and hand him over to the authorities for execution. The innocent disciples were devastated by both pieces of this news, the betrayal and the Lord’s imminent death. Then, forgetting all that what’s coming his way, the Lord begins to comfort the disciples. He does it with his presence and with his words which afforded them hope. God had comforted his people in Babylon in the same way.

God comforted his people with his presence. Isaiah tells the people, “Fear not to cry out and say to the cities of Judah: here is your God”. The God who they thought had abandoned them for good, assures them of his presence in their midst to bring them back to life. In our sorrows, bereavements, and trails, the Lord is always there by our side. We simply need to believe it and feel his presence. It is a mysterious, enduring presence, perceptible only in faith.

God also comforted his people with his words. God said through Isaiah, “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her service is at an end, her guilt is expiated”. The service mentioned here is enslavement to sin. At the Last Supper the Lord tells his disciples: “I no longer call you slaves…I call you friends”. God addresses his word to his people to tell us the truth (his words do not sugarcoat the reality of our lives) and to afford us hope. The truth was that the people in Babylon needed to make plain the rugged land of their lives. The hope was that their service was at an end and their guilt was expiated.

Advent is one of the most hopeful liturgical seasons of the year. The image today is that of a shepherd who feeds his flock, gathering the lambs in his arms, carrying them in his bosom. This is our Lord. This is what he does here at this very moment, giving us comfort and feeding us with his real presence and divine word.