A bad kind of despair is when you’ve worked until you can give no more and it feels like you’ve been wasting your time. The Isaiah reading in today’s lectionary speaks about that… (49:4) ‘But I said, “I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the LORD, and my reward with my God.”‘ But in the end there’s a note of hope – more than hope… (49:6)'”It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”‘ God’s saying, ‘Even though you’ve failed, you’ve kept faith, so I’m going to make you part of an even greater achievement’. There are specifics too – Christians associate this ‘servant’ with Jesus. And the greater thing is something that’s mentioned sometimes in the Old Testament – God’s hopes for all nations to come under the umbrella of God’s love. Surely this applies to Christians too. There’s no excuse for chauvinism.
