Christmas Year B - Isaiah 62:6-12

Isaiah 62:6-12

The back-story for Isaiah 62 is that Jerusalem’s grain was given as food for her enemies and foreigners drank the wine for which God’s people labored. This was God’s doing and it was not marvelous in their eyes. They became a byword to the nations and were seemingly forsaken and forgotten by God. But their cries ascended to the heavens as those who relentlessly “remind the LORD and give God no rest” until God remembered and relented. Then the rejected became the Redeemed and the forsaken the Sought Out. Jesus fleshed out Isaiah’s vision of a people who give God no rest in the parable of a widow who will give a judge no rest until she receives justice.  The lesson should not be lost on us that God invites the complaints of the forgotten and forsaken even when we are responsible for whatever prompts the complaint. We might be reluctant to complain, since it feels like whining which no one likes to listen to, but when circumstances call for it complaining means we have a “for better, for worse, in sickness and in health” relationship with God and trust that God, our friend, our lover, our Savior, listens to our whole life.