Comfort

Reading these passages

Five verses after the sentence at the top of this page, Paul says what had happened to him: For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life.

He does not say what it was. Scholars have guessed at a riot, an illness, an imprisonment, a shipwreck; the letter simply assumes the readers already know. What it does say is how far it went — beyond strength, past the point of expecting to survive — and then adds a line that is stranger than the despair itself: But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead.

That is the man writing the most quoted passage in scripture about comfort. Not someone consoling from a distance, and not someone whose trouble had resolved neatly enough to make a lesson of. He is writing close to it.

Called alongside

The Greek word for comfort in this passage is paraklesis, built from para, beside, and kaleo, to call. It means a calling-to-one's-side — the summoning of someone to stand with you. It is the same root as parakletos, the name Jesus gives the Holy Spirit in John's gospel, usually rendered Comforter or Advocate.

English does not have a word for it. Comfort now suggests soothing, and the Latin behind it, confortare, actually meant to strengthen — closer to the original, but four hundred years out of date. What paraklesis describes is not a feeling administered to someone. It is a presence arriving.

Paul uses that word or its verb ten times in five verses. The density is not accidental; he is hammering a single point: Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.

The logic runs in a chain, and the last link is the one people skip. Comfort received is not the end of the sequence. It is the equipment for the next person, and the qualification is not wisdom or training but having been there — by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted. Which also means the trouble is not wasted, though Paul is careful never to say it was sent for that purpose.

A mother

Isaiah reaches for the plainest comparison available and it is not the one the Old Testament usually reaches for: As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

Scripture calls God father constantly. Here, at the very end of Isaiah, in a passage about a ruined city being rebuilt, the image is maternal — and specifically it is the image of a mother with a child who is upset, which is a narrower and more physical picture than fatherhood generally carries in these texts. Nothing is being argued. A comparison is being made, and it is the one everybody recognises.

The psalms keep the same register. The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. Nigh — the claim is about proximity before it is about rescue, and the order matters. The nearness is not the reward for recovering.

Not comfortless

John 14:18 is one of the places where the King James makes a choice worth noticing: I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.

The Greek word is orphanous. Orphans. Jesus is speaking on the last night, to men who are about to lose him, and the word he chooses is the one for children whose parent has died. The translators rendered it comfortless — defensible, because the surrounding passage is about the Comforter and they were keeping the thread visible — but the domestic force of the original is softened by it. Spanish translations generally keep the literal word, and the sentence lands harder there.

What follows is not a promise of consolation in the abstract but of return. I will come to you. The remedy offered for being left is not an explanation. It is somebody coming back.

The psalms do not tidy up

Psalm 23 is read at funerals so often that the middle of it has gone quiet, and the sentence deserves its literal weight: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Through. Not around, and not out of. The psalm does not claim the valley can be avoided or shortened, and the reason given for not fearing is a single clause — thou art with me — which is presence again rather than rescue. The rod and staff are a shepherd's tools, one for driving off what threatens the flock and one for steering it. Neither removes the valley.

Psalm 94:19 is more precise about what being comforted actually feels like from inside: In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul. The first phrase is as accurate a description of a mind under strain as exists anywhere. And notice the psalmist does not report that the multitude stopped. He reports that something arrived in the middle of it.

Psalm 119:50 names the mechanism as plainly as it is named anywhere: This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me. Quickened is an old word for made alive. Not distracted, not soothed, not explained to.

Held up

Isaiah 41:10 piles up promises in a way that reads as repetitive until you separate them: Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.

Two commands, each with a reason attached, and then three verbs that are not synonyms. Strengthen is what happens inside the person. Help is what happens alongside them. Uphold is what happens when the first two have run out and something else has to take the weight — the Hebrew is the word for propping up a thing that would otherwise fall. The sequence is ordered by how much is left of you.

And Paul makes the whole business mutual rather than one-directional: And our hope of you is stedfast, knowing, that as ye are partakers of the sufferings, so shall ye be also of the consolation. Partakers — the Greek is koinonoi, partners, shareholders, people with a stake in the same concern. Suffering and comfort are treated as one joint account rather than two experiences.

Blessed are they that mourn

The beatitude is the strangest sentence on the page, and familiarity has worn the strangeness off it: Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Christians have read it in more than one way. Some take the mourning as grief in the ordinary sense, and the beatitude as a promise about the age to come, when the losses are answered rather than explained. Some read it as mourning over sin, one's own or the world's, which is how a good deal of the older commentary took it. Some read it as lament in the prophetic sense — grief at the way things are, which is the disposition the prophets model and which Jesus himself displays over Jerusalem.

These are not the same reading and this page will not adjudicate between them. What they share is a refusal of the obvious alternative, which would be to call the mourner unfortunate. The sentence is constructed to be uncomfortable: it puts blessed and mourn in the same clause and offers no reconciliation of them except a future passive verb. They shall be comforted. By whom is not stated, and in Greek that omission is usually a way of saying God without saying God.