Canter Bridge

Even if one did not know that the discourse of Isaiah will pivot repeatedly on the Hebrew word אמן—used of faithfulness, reliability, truthful sturdiness, and belief—the italicized exclamation that follows might hint at the direction to come.

How the faithful (נאמן) city has become a whore, she who was full of justice!

Righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers. Your silver has become dross, your best wine mixed with water. Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them. (Isaiah 1:21–23 ESV)

The book’s prefatory first chapter, after all, serves like a thematically dense prelude to a theatrical work, much as a pit orchestra might touch on all the themes soon to be broached by the actors on the stage. It soberly teases the reader with topics that will shape the core of the book’s sustained argument. Nothing lies nearer to that core’s core than justice.

Here, the prophetic exclamation decries its perversion. One feels the pathos of memory in these remembering words: she who was full of justice …

That personified city, Zion of old and Zion of heart-felt ideals, has become a whore. An ideal betrayed drips greater pain than the mediocre malaise of an ideal never known.

Jerusalem has suffered a tragic moral collapse, a high-altitude fall into confused depths where self-interest and the sale of righteousness at the market rate have supplanted the concern for the weakest members of the community that was once held sacred. So far are the community’s judicial gatekeepers from caring about the most important things that only poetry can express the profound loss of it: … and the widow’s cause does not come to them.

There can be no hope, it would seem, for such a traitorous, defiled people.

Yet, stunningly, the verses that follow speak of divine armaments deployed against the powerful perpetrators of this collapse—not to exterminate but to purge. It will be an application of ardent justice so that justice—all but extinct within these walls—might live again, to the joy of the orphan and the widow’s consolation.

Mercy will indeed prove new in the morning. New and restorative of lost things, though fearfully burning until the refining is over.