Eucharistic meditation, Third Epiphany

Ecclesiastes 4:1: Then I returned and considered all the oppression that is done under the sun: And look! The tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter— on the side of their oppressors there is power, but they have no comforter.

The great evil that Solomon describes here is not merely the reality of oppression, not merely the fact that oppressors hold all the cards, but that the oppressed have no assistance, no comfort, no deliverer. He repeats the phrase “but they have no comfort” twice in the verse.

Elsewhere in the Old Testament, this phrase is repeated in connection with the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC by the Babylonians. How lonely sits the city that was once full of people, Jeremiah laments. She has become a widow, she weeps bitterly in the night, and she has none to comfort her. She has fallen astonishingly, and she has no comforter. Zion stretches out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her. All hear her groanings, “but there is no one to comfort me” (Lamentations 1:2, 9, 17, 21).

Israel is the oppressed. She is full of tears, while all the power is in the hands of the Babylonian oppressors. And there is no one to comfort.

But Israel is not the only solitary sufferer. Israel suffers oppression without comfort, without assistance, but the prophets also look forward to a true Israel, an Israel whittled down to a single man, who will suffer Israel’s oppression in His own body, who will be without friends or comforters. “Reproach has broken my heart, and I am so sick,” says the Psalmist: “I looked for sympathy, but there was none, and for comforters but I found none.” “My loved ones and my friends stand aloof from my plague; all my kinsman stand afar off.”

Jesus is that true Israel, forsaken by His Father, abandoned by His friends, left to the vicious assaults of the oppressor, with none to comfort Him. But through His isolation in suffering and death, He has triumphed over sin, death, and the devil. Through His separation from the Father, He has united us to the Father. Because He was abandoned by His friends, He has formed a circle of friends. Because He was without comforter, He has become our Comforter, and sent us Another Comforter. Betrayed by those who shared bread with Him, He has invited us to share His table.

For we celebrate a meal first celebrated “on the night in which He was betrayed.”