The reversal of the wilderness into a garden resonates with a widespread religious imagination in which barrenness is not the final word. Hindu traditions often picture the cosmos as renewed through divine presence (dharma restored, fertility returning), while in Taoism the image of water breaking forth where it “shouldn’t” evokes the Dao’s quiet power to bring life without coercion. Even where traditions are less theistic, the motif remains: in Buddhism, what looks like a spiritual desert can become a place of awakening, and the “flowers in the wasteland” theme can function as a figure for transformation rather than mere external improvement. The summons to strengthen weak hands and knees echoes virtue traditions that treat courage as communal and teachable. Stoicism, for example, speaks of fortitude amid trial, not as denial of suffering but as training the soul to stand firm and to help others stand firm. Confucian ethics similarly frames moral life as the cultivation of steadfastness and the strengthening of social bonds, so that the vulnerable are upheld by ritual, duty, and humane concern. The opening of eyes and ears and the loosening of tongues—healing as restoration to participation—has parallels across cultures where salvation is pictured as reintegration. In Islamic spirituality, guidance (huda) is often described as moving from blindness to sight and from constriction to expansiveness; in Jewish thought, to be redeemed is also to be gathered and enabled to sing again. If one reads these healings not only medically but socially, they also resemble themes in many traditions where liberation includes being able to speak, be heard, and take one’s place in the community. John’s question from confinement touches a perennial moral tension: what to do when hope is delayed and the signs are ambiguous. Buddhist and Jain traditions are frank about how disappointment and craving for certainty can intensify suffering; they propose practices of patience and clear seeing when expectations are unmet. In the Hebrew wisdom tradition and in Islam’s discourse on sabr (patient endurance), faithfulness is likewise tested not in triumph but under pressure, when the righteous must live without immediate vindication. The warning about being “scandalized” by humility and a lowly path parallels a recurring spiritual critique of prestige. Taoist texts often distrust displays of power and praise the unassuming; Zen stories regularly overturn the seeker’s expectation that the highest truth arrives with grandeur. In Sufi literature, too, the friend of God may appear hidden, even outwardly disgraced, and the test is whether one can recognize divine action without demanding the costume of worldly success. Finally, the contrast between the desert prophet and “soft garments” in palaces recalls the renunciant ideal found in many places: the Hindu sannyasi, the Buddhist monastic, the Jain ascetic, and the Cynic philosopher each witness—imperfectly and differently—that freedom can require distance from luxury and from the flattering proximity of power. Yet the texts also press a subtler point: greatness is not simply austerity, but a vocation received and fulfilled, and the measure of it may be hidden from ordinary hierarchies—an idea that finds analogues in traditions that locate true nobility in inner conformity to the Good rather than in social rank. The promised return with joy, sorrow fleeing, gestures toward an eschatological horizon shared in different keys: Judaism’s hope for restoration, Islam’s confidence in ultimate justice, and even some philosophical traditions’ longing for a final harmony between virtue and reality. Where these readings differ is in how concrete the promised renewal is and how personally it is anchored; but the human intuition beneath them—that history is not closed, that the broken can be made whole, and that the humble may bear the decisive word—appears again and again across the world’s spiritual grammars.