Not all roads make for an aesthetically pleasing photograph. I have photos of roads in the highlands and alongside lochs, and single-track not-quite roads running through several favourite glens. Roads of course don't have to be attractive, but they do have to be fit for purpose, which is to make travel easy, or at least easier
Isaiah knew about roads, because he knew also about trackless wastes, never ending desert, wilderness where travellers become disoriented, and run out of energy and water. At least if there's a road that goes somewhere you have a chance.
Seventy years earlier the exiles had trekked across some of the most inhospitable land in the middle east. All very well to say the Lord was going to set them free, that Babylon would fall, and they could go home.
How? What about transport, provisions, water? The logistics were hard enough. Add to that the dangerous terrain of desert, mountain and wilderness, and maybe Babylon wasn't so bad after all.
And Isaiah said, "A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God...See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland."
Not only will God bring them home to Zion, he'll build the road for them. It's this outrageous optimism that makes Isaiah the stand out prophet of Advent. I read him, year on year, to rinse my mind of pessimism and negativity, which often takes the form of an unhealthy realism, the kind of well reasoned caution that thrives by suppressing imagination. Isaiah is an adrenaline shot for jaded imaginations, and an antidote for resignation to the status quo.
We all have our ways to go in the life that is ours, sometimes through arid, barren and even featureless landscape. You might even think that as a culture and society that's exactly where we all find ourselves right now - in a strange world where it's hard to find our way.
This year as every year, Advent has come at the right time. Advent is the promise of paths in the desert, roads in the wilderness, a way to travel and a place to go.
Five Hundred years later, John the Baptist would be guilty of breach of the peace as he shouted Isaiah's words back at all those seeking a new way, and a new hope. If ever there was a fanatic for Advent and a fan of Isaiah, it was John the Baptist.
Advent is when we remember again, that Jesus walked that way ahead of us, will be that way for us, and summons those, like us, who feel exiled, on the margins, held down and held back, to come, and follow him on the way. Advent is the time for finding our way again.
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