Canter Bridge

The Isaianiac rhetoric is fond of naming names. People and places are with abandon given new names that raise hopes, channel energies, and uncover unseen dignity.

En route to the magnificent promises of its eleventh and twelfth verses, Isaiah’s 58th chapter bites fiercely into the travesty that is mere religious ritual with no passion for justice at its core.

Fasting stands in as proxy for a whole range of religious activity that is here reduced to clumsy posing. Isaiah does not do this out of some animosity towards ritual, far from it. Some of the book’s most soaring promises concern doors swung open to those who have heretofore been excluded from that religious practice that the book does not tremble to call ‘delight’. On the contrary, ritual is affirmed when it structures the cadence of a  communal life that is fueled by attention to what YHWH is up to and oriented by the practice of shaping shared life around the creation and provision of justice.

Fasting that is part and parcel of such living is described like this:

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? (Isaiah 58:6–7 ESV)

The promises that attend to a community that lives in this way are lavish and bold:

Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. (Isaiah 58:8–10 ESV)

Yet the prophet’s efforts to describe a future where YHWH and his people cohabitate to the blessing of both does not take up the practice of assigning new names until verses 11 and 12. Here, that instinct for new names serves as a kind of climax to the deeply promissory nature of the chapter:

And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail. And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in. (Isaiah 58:11–12 ESV)

Sometimes a name identifies the person who has at one time in the past performed a deed that forever after marks the individual as having peaked or—better—having displayed his true nature in the moment of its performance. ‘That’s the guy who rescued five people from a burning house’, we might say. ‘We call him “the rescuer”.’

At other times, the name makes manifest a habit or an ongoing heroism that becomes the purest distillation of the named person. ‘She’s a one-woman Mercy Ship’, we might say, intending to suggest that her instinct or discipline for merciful acts has not yet reached its end.

It is possible that Isaiah 58.11-12 has something of both in view, though the accent falls on the former. The redeemed and the returnees of Judah will be known forever as the perpetrators of that glorious reestablishment of YHWH’s city in a land that had once been lost to them. Yet, because the Isaianic horizon is open-ended, it is not difficult to imagine the naming of a people whose glorious moment of re-construction will become more than just a well-remembered moment.

They will have become Repairer of the Breach, Restorer of Streets to Dwell In.

Promise becomes destiny, destiny becomes new nature. A people is re-born and grows to full stature, unable to leave a breach alone, unavoidably impatient with crumbling streets, destined both for blessing and to bless.