Canter Bridge

Isaiah’s complex journey will celebrate beloved Zion even as it works out a deep, genetic yearning for distant nations to know and serve Israel’s God. The book releases its energy in both centripetal and centrifugal form without denying either motion, as though gathering opposing forces into one insistent, polychromatic song. The book of Isaiah is not simple. Neither is it complicated. Instead, it is complex, a careful gathering of layers into one coherent statement that stretches the imagination while nourishing the reader’s capacity to allow multiple plates to spin. Attention to any one does not cancel out the rotation of the others.

Isaiah, the book, is a most densely coreographed dance. It is easy to give up on its treasure too early. The wise reader stays with the book, sometimes year upon year, until it yields its richness.

Zion is Isaiah’s passion. Indeed, for a work that conceals its ideological ‘center’ with such guile the book of Isaiah seldom allows one’s glance to stray too long from what one scholar has called the theme of ‘Zion’s final destiny’. Although one stands before a book that resists all reductionisms, most simplicities, and many definitions, it is possible to think of Zion as a metropolitan metaphor for ‘YHWH’s beloved people’. It is not that YHWH has become a god of the city only, but that the prophet who stands behind this book and the reverential custodians of his tradition agree to speak of the whole dispersed people of God as citizens of his holy city. Thus does ‘Zion’ stand in for all that is glorious in YHWH’s purpose for his people. The awful realism of Israelite prophetism demands that ‘Zion’ also represent this people’s depravity, her wasted hope, her penultimate misery.

To speak of which, penultimacy becomes a key notion. YHWH’s insistence upon realizing Zion’s glorious destiny as her ultimate vocation casts all that is less than this into the shadows of penultimacy. Though Zion’s fall—her willful wallowing in less than she was meant to be—is not final, it is all too real. The drama of lifting her from the muck she finds so seductive is heart and soul of the Isaianic plot. YHWH will have his glorious people, yet he will not deny her the opportunity to achieve her splendor only as her heart chooses it. Thus, Isaiah’s narrative is destined to take a long view.

Isaiah, indeed, is a very long book.

Even as this complex work elevates Zion to the status of all that a stubbornly good God can will for his people, it insists that the (all?) nations will partake of this apotheosis. Jealousy and generosity mingle in a scandalously particularist route that leads to universal benevolence. There is enough good will here to overwhelm any vessel that attempts to contain it, though ‘good’ in this case must lose all semblance of ‘niceness’ or prettiness. It is a volition most severe, intentionality hardened beyond measure, decision carved into the granite of creation itself.

Following the book’s introductory anthology in chapter one, Isaiah’s vision of visions in chapter two contemplates an elevated Jerusalem to which all nations stream for enlightenment like a huge, rushing river. The reader does well to grasp this vision in her memory with uncommon tenacity until she finds it again, filled out and adorned, in the book’s final chapter.

Along the way, she will remember that no blood and no joy are capable of erasing the persistent, celestial decision to make Zion glorious not against her untamed will but through it, according to it, and by its very means.

Jerusalem, then, will shine. Nations will dance in her streets. When peoples sing back to YHWH redemption’s song, they will sing of Zion and He will not begrudge.