"Comfort! Comfort my people, says your God." How wonderful those words sound to us. How many times we feel the need for comfort. How often we need an assuring and tender word to ease the hurt we feel. Every year about this time we hear those wonderful prophetic words sung in Handel’s Messiah, or read in our churches from the portion of scripture that biblical scholars call "Second Isaiah," to distinguish it from the writings of the eighth-century prophet.

They were written for a people for whom things had gone terribly wrong. A terrible calamity had taken place. The nation had been overrun by the Babylonian armies in 587-86 B.C.E. Jerusalem was destroyed and laid waste and some 15,000 people were hauled off into captivity to a foreign land hundreds of miles away across the desert to the r…