As the rain falls gray and chilling around me here in western Oregon, the Arizona Highways magazine arrives to remind me that skies are clearer and temperatures warmer there in the state that was home to my mother’s family. I am blessed to be able to visit there once or twice a year and drive again highways through desert and mountain landscapes which have a desolate beauty with which I resonate.
I am also very aware from desert journeys of my childhood, before air conditioning in cars was common, of how blistering and unwelcoming a desert highway can be. The stretch of what is now I-10 between Los Angeles and the cut off in Arizona to Prescott is seared into my memory as a forbidding ride through hot, sandy desert where we more than once encountered blowing sand which forced us to pull over.
Growing up with trips through the desert also gave me memories of occasions when we would travel there in cooler seasons and the desert would present itself in ways often photographed in Arizona’s iconic tourist magazine. The seemingly barren landscape would blossom in vast fields of colored blooms. So that is the image in my mind as I read the beginning of this week’s text from Isaiah 35:1-10. I know for a fact that the desert can “rejoice and blossom,” even “blossom abundantly.”
But those hot summer car rides of my youth, through bare desert without a flower in sight, also help me appreciate what the text goes on to say, “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.” Yes, we were riding, not walking, but those sweaty hours in the car were hard on a child’s patience. It was always a huge treat to stop for a meal or a snack, to be given a can of pop or a milk shake (but not one of the then ubiquitous “date shakes” sold at establishments across that stretch of highway). Sometimes a bag of ice was bought and placed on the rubber floor mat beside our feet, bringing sighs of relief.
Isaiah’s lush prophetic images of the exiles’ return journey from Babylon suggest their own purely physical pleasure and relief from the heat, dryness and dangers of a desert highway between Babylon and Judah. Of course, the actual return journey at the end of the exile offered no such comforts. So these verses take on a future significance, a promise of blessings to come reaching beyond the return from exile and into the age of the Messiah.
In particular, the promises of healing in verses 5 and 6 are taken up by Jesus and applied to Himself in our Gospel lesson from Matthew 11:2-11 this week. John the Baptist in prison wondered if the Man he reluctantly baptized is in the fact the promised one. Jesus sent word to John that Isaiah’s promises regarding an even greater return for God’s people were being fulfilled… with one addition: “the dead are raised.” As John sat, very likely contemplating the likelihood of being executed, Jesus assured him that death was not the end of his hope.
As we pass through whatever dry “deserts” which lie before us, even the bleak desert of impending death, let us cling to the promises fulfilled in Jesus, not just the miracle of a blossoming desert, but the miracle of resurrection.