Excluded Servants Hear Birth and Maternal Comfort for Zion

Your brothers who hate you have said, let the Lord be glorified

Hear the word, you who tremble. Family members who hate you and cast you out for my name's sake have said, let the Lord be glorified, so that we may see your joy—but it is they who shall be put to shame. A voice from the temple: it is the sound of the Lord dealing with his enemies. Before she was in labor she gave birth; Zion delivers sons in a day. Shall I open the womb and not deliver? Rejoice with Jerusalem, all who love her; nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast. I will extend prosperity like a river. You shall be carried on her arm and dandled on her knees. As a mother comforts, so I will comfort you. When you see this, your heart shall rejoice; servants shall flourish; enemies shall know the Lord's indignation.

Excluded tremblers are the first audience. Mocking kin use pious slogans as a taunt. Birth-before-labor is the shock of a future arriving faster than pain's timetable. Maternal comfort is God's, through Jerusalem's abundance. These metaphors must not shame bodies, infertility, adoption, or grief, and the conflict must not authorize hatred of Jewish opponents. Servants' joy is not a brief for intra-Jewish contempt or Christian score-settling.

Dandled on the knees is almost too intimate for a book that also speaks of fire. A warranted life is to stand with those cast out for God's name without returning the hate, to receive mother-comfort without policing anyone's womb, and to let flourishing servants be evidence rather than a faction.