The Book of Isaiah is shot through with the dual theme of weariness and rest.
YHWH is seen as the one who offers rest to the weary, most typically in the context of return from exile and repose within one’s own natural space. The subtext is of a willfully agitated people who will not receive what is given—that which is kindly offered to them by YHWH—and instead will be shoe-horned out of their place and scattered to nations that have no regard for the weary homeless.
Even the eventual placement of returning captives in the land that had once been lost to them is regularly phrased via a verb that bears the resonance of ‘causing to rest’ (Hebrew: נוח).
Israel/Judah’s chosen idols are seen to be heavy to carry, thus weary-making. Yet YHWH bears his returning children, or causes them to be borne by others, back to their land in a way that renders weariness a fading memory. Indeed, such people shall rise up on wings like eagles, they shall run and not grow weary, they shall walk and not faint.
How strange, then, to find in the midst of a harsh Isaianic judgement oracle that the terrible plight of YHWH’s people in exile is distilled down to a refusal to rest, a chosen deafness against the offer of repose. The prophet suggests that it is only Judah’s alien captors who will finally talk sense into YHWH’s rebellious children, even if in truth it is YHWH himself who borrows their strange babbling in order to do so.
For by people of strange lips and with a foreign tongue the Lord will speak to this people, to whom he has said, ‘This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose’; yet they would not hear. (Isaiah 28:11–12 ESV)
Since the book of Isaiah and the canon in which it stands as a pillar allows one to extend this dynamic beyond its historic origins and into the borders of our own ongoing wrestling with God and the world in which he has placed us, one might ask:
How then have we become this nervous, this shattered, this far from home?
Canter Bridge 
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