The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. (Isaiah 40:3-5, KJV)
We visit another symbolic landscape this week in this familiar passage from the Book of Isaiah, seen as a foreshadowing of the coming of Christ, where the prophet Isaiah portrays the devastated nation of Israel in Babylonian exile as a wasteland, whose reclamation is announced by a divine herald with a message of hope echoing through the rough and ruined terrain. To expedite the arrival of their redeemer, the messenger calls on the dispirited Jewish people to set right what is wrong in their life of faith and spiritual practices, undertaking major "infrastructure work" in leveling hills and filling in vallies to make a straight road for him to take. As we will see in our next entry, this prophecy is realized in New Testament accounts of John the Baptist. Like rumblings registered on a seismograph, the contrasting peaks and troughs in this new media print from Czech Graphic Artist David Wojkowicz convey the earth-rending power of the lone wilderness voice, demanding nothing less than a geological upheaval of the planet to prepare the way for the Lord. (John Kohan)