Canter Bridge

When the fifty-four chapter of the book called Isaiah addresses the exiled Jewish community as ‘Barren One’, it initiates one of the most stunning deployments of ironic negatives that Scripture and literature have known.

‘Sing, O barren one, who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married,’ says the Lord. ‘Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities. (Isaiah 54:1–3 ESV)

After a vocative address (‘O barren one’) that defines the little community of un-belongers in terms of the experience of a woman that they have not known, the next two negative clauses drive further rhetorical nails into this coffin of deprivation. You who did not bear…. you who have not been in labor.

Has any woman ever been defined in terms more relentlessly cruel? Has any community had residual hope stripped more piteously from its tired embrace?

Yet the intent is exactly the opposite of the form, which is why the words ‘irony’ and ‘ironic’ nestle so comfortably as descriptors. The very next negative is not an additional rhetorical spitting out of what is not, but an exquisite turn towards that reversal of fortunes which is nearly synonymous with redemption in this book.

Such will be the pile-on of children returning to the bosom of this heretofore bereft woman, we read, that Lady Zion will need to unlearn her politics and economies of scarcity:

Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. (Isaiah 54:2 ESV)

That is, the negatives re-start but with precisely the opposite effect than the one that has bound exiled Judah so fiercely to hopelessness.

Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. (Isaiah 54:4 ESV)

Now the dam has been breached. The flow of negatives becomes a rushing river, yet for reasons that deprive Judah not of many things but of just one: her previous self-definition in terms of what she is not. All things have become new and Judah leaps into the in-creation reality of all that she is rather than all that she is not.

All Judah’s no’s, to borrow language from a later covenant, have become ‘yes’ and ‘amen’. All her battered hopes are made new.

Yet the prophet’s way with a pen allows us to read these New Things against the dark and life-denying parchment that had become Judah’s very being.

No has lost is grip. Redemption’s glow is now vivid. Ironic. Maternal and spacious. Laugh-making. The opposite of no and better than new.