Day Six
Movement II — The Ground
Springs
There are places where God stops describing what he does and starts telling you who he is. This is one.
I, even I, am he that comforteth you: who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass? Isaiah 51:12, KJV
And then, twenty-six chapters later, the same speaker reaches for the least expected comparison in the prophets:
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. Isaiah 66:13, KJV
Today’s morsel
“I, even I, am he.”
Say it as his line, not yours. You are overhearing a self-introduction.
Wells
The Hebrew opens anochi anochi hu menachemchem — I, I, he, your comforter. The pronoun is doubled the same way the imperative was doubled in 40:1. Hebrew leaning on a thing again, and leaning this time on the identity of the speaker.
And menachem is a participle: the one comforting. Not a verb he performs on occasion. A standing description. This is as close as the Old Testament comes to putting Comforter on God as a name, and it is worth noticing that the New Testament will hand exactly that name to the Spirit.
Watch what he does with it. He identifies himself as the comforter, and then immediately asks: so who are you, that you should be afraid of a man who is going to die?
That is not the consolation we would have written. We would have said: do not be afraid, the trouble will pass. He says instead: consider the relative durability of the two parties. The thing frightening you is grass. The one standing beside you is not.
Comfort here works by resizing, not by soothing. It does not tell you the threat is imaginary. It tells you the threat is temporary and the comforter is not, and it leaves you to do the arithmetic.
Isaiah 66:13 is remarkable and the church has often been shy about it. God, who has spent the book as king, warrior, husband, and father, compares himself to a mother with a distressed child. It is not the only place — he cries out like a woman in labour in 42:14, and asks in 49:15 whether a woman can forget her nursing child.
The point of the image is not tenderness in the abstract. It is competence without explanation. A mother comforting a small child does not first argue the child into calm. She picks the child up. Presence does the work while the reasoning is still unavailable.
Which is the shape of everything we have seen so far: called alongside.
Aquifer
The maternal images in Isaiah. 42:14 (a woman in labour), 49:15 (a nursing mother who cannot forget), 66:13 (a mother comforting). These are similes, not statements about God’s being — the grammar is comparative in each case, and Scripture’s consistent naming of God is Father. But similes are chosen, not accidental, and the choice here is deliberate: Isaiah reaches for the most reliably present human comfort he can name.
Track the participle. Look up Lamentations 1:2, 9, 16, 17, 21, where the same participle appears in the negative — she hath no comforter, again and again, five times in one chapter. Jerusalem in Lamentations has no menachem. Isaiah 51:12 is God answering that book by name.