There is perhaps no passage in all the Bible that appreciates Jacob/Israel more intensely than Isaiah’s forty-third chapter.
Jacob/Israel is the work of YHWH’s creating hands. She is the object of his deeply felt assurances that she need not fear. She is protected by him through flood and fire. YHWH gives nations as ransom to bring Jacob/Israel home. She is precious, honored, and beloved in YHWH’s sight. The nation is called by his name, comprised of his very sons, his very daughters. Jacob/Israel is YHWH’s servant.
Jacob/Israel are also witnesses to YHWH’s nature and purpose. Yet she is blind. It is in this ironic antithesis that one of this brilliant chapter’s most beguiling textures is to be felt.
Witnesses see things and then report what they have seen. Witnesses, very nearly by definition, can see. One might scarcely imagine that a blind individual might hear the noises of a crime and report to the authorities what she has heard. But this would be an exception to assumptions and would require comment and explanation to bring it into ordinary imagination. In any case, we shall observe that Jacob/Israel is both blind and deaf, though they have (unseeing) eyes and (unhearing) ears.
In this chapter, we have a strange thing: blind and deaf witnesses.
The ancient synagogue readings, attested in our Masoretic text by paragraph markers פ and ס, do not separate verses 1-7 from verses 8-10. In this reading tradition, the profoundly promissory note that rings out in 1-7 is the foundation for the divine summons that is issued in verses 8-10.
Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf, yet have ears!
Let all the nations gather together, and let the peoples assemble. Who among them declared this, and foretold to us the former things? Let them bring their witnesses to justify them, and let them hear and say, ‘It is true.’
You are my witnesses, says the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.
Isaiah 43.8-10 (NRSV)
By my lights, the ‘people’ (עם) whom someone is summoned to bring forth in verse 8 is Jacob/Israel. Then the ‘nations’ (גוים) and ‘peoples’ (לאמים) in the subsequent verse are gentiles. In other words, verses 8 and 9 do not stand in synonymous parallelism. Rather the text is working its way forward across the human landscape, beginning with the erstwhile scattered children of Jacob/Israel and then coming to the nations, which are conveniently located for bringing sons and daughters home.
By my reading, the nations are invited to present witnesses who might account for YHWH’s unexpected and redemptive conduct, an offer tendered with the full assurance that the nations will come up empty. They have no witnesses. They lack understanding of YHWH’s creative-redemptive artistry. They do not fathom it and certainly cannot have predicted it.
By means of the emphatic plural pronoun at the beginning of verse ten (אתם / you), YHWH then presents his own witnesses, unpromising though they be.
You are my witnesses, says the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.
Isaiah 43.10 (NRSV, italics added)
These witnesses to YHWH’s uniqueness are the people of verse 8, none other than the scattered and now rescued sons and daughters of Israel. They are also YHWH’s chosen servant, a body of people who have been let in on YHWH’s otherwise undiscernible purpose to rescue his Israel and, in the mix, enlighten and welcome the nations.
Yet we learned back in verse 8 that this people is blind and deaf.
If one is justified in linking verses 8 and 10 so that Israel/Jacob, the blind and deaf people, and YHWH’s servant are one and the same—I feel confident that this reading is suggested by the text itself—then the irony of blind and deaf witnesses comes to the fore.
In time, we shall become more familiar with YHWH’s servant, a figure who is deeply compromised—one might even say impaired—both by willful incapacity to see and hear and by YHWH’s own striking. One can hardly imagine a more enigmatic persona.
In this passage, YHWH’s witnesses are his servant, now brought into awareness of his redemptive purpose for them with the hint that they had reason to suspect it aforetime. To whom do they testify? It would seem to the watching and listening nations that have participated in—indeed facilitated—their return home.
If in the Isaianic vision, the redemptive purpose of YHWH remains constant, its outworking in space, time, and human history is unfailingly impossible to anticipate. There are hints, of which Jacob/Israel is the curator and steward. But until events take their turn, no more than that.
A sermon preached at Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church, Wethersfield, Connecticut, USA
17 December 2023
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.
In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.
Luke 1.1-4 (ESV)
I have always felt different.
It’s OK, I muddle through. I’m not having a public crisis and I’m not about to reveal any un-Christmasy, awkward secrets from up here today.
But it’s true. I have always felt different.
In high school, I was the Christian kid on the basketball team, never at the parties and rarely at the dances. (That was probably a mercy for the art of dance.)
In retrospect, our Christian tradition kept me from falling into some of the life-twisting sins that mess up teenage lives. I’m grateful for that. But it also distanced me from my friends. Maybe unnecessarily.
I got good grades, but that wasn’t a thing that was valued so much in the little town where Pastor Scott and I grew up. In fact, a high grade didn’t really earn you any friends.
But I was competitive, so I didn’t like coming in second in a class. I would actually work hard to get the highest grade while making sure it wasn’t higher than it needed to be. It was a successful week when I could get the best grade of the class on the mid-term exam and not have it be more than, say, a 92. 94 gets icky. Don’t even talk to me about 97.
I was introverted and not good with girls. (Again, probably a mercy to the young women of our valley.)
But this business of feeling different wasn’t something that ended when I could finally grow a beard and pay taxes.
I still feel different. Maybe you do, too.
In terms of my vocation, my professional calling, I’m a biblical scholar. Can I share with you that for a person in my line of work, listening to sermons is an agony?
I sit there thinking, ‘Well, OK, but ….’ or ‘Wow, you sure bungled that one … ‘ or … ‘Really???’
I have nothing against pastors. I generally love them and spend the lion’s share of my life shaping new ones as biblical interpreters and human beings who I hope are worth following. I pray for Karen’s and my pastors and their wives every morning because I know something about how demanding their work is and how much they need God’s help if they’re to do it well.
In fact, if you were to ask me what I believe my primary spiritual gift to be, I’d tell you as I’ve told others: ‘I’m a pastor, and God for some reason has asked me to exercise that gifting mostly in academic communities’ … like the Biblical Seminary of Colombia where we serve in South America.
Now in recent years, God has spared me much of that sermon-listening agony. One of the reasons I love the privilege Karen and I have of belonging to our WEFC community is that we have such a high standard of preaching here. I’m constantly in awe of Scott’s careful way with a biblical text. And, I can say the very same thing about Pastor Samuel in our church in Colombia. Sammy is an excellent interpreter of the Bible and a genuine shepherd of souls. So the Lord has been gentle with my quirky calling and its complications.
But in general, listening to a sermon has for me always been somewhere between uncomfortable and painful; participating in a Bible Study is a matter of measuring my words and trying not to say the wrong thing or over-complicate a perfectly good conversation among our brothers and sisters.
Even responding to a theological question asked of me by one of my son’s college friends sitting in the back seat of my car, led to my Johnny turning around and saying to his friend with a smile on his face…
I just gotta’ warn you, my Dad always complicates everything…
You see, I’m different. And I’ve always known it.
But I’m not quite done yet with this little public confessional.
My calling has meant that I have spent most of my adult life in Latin America … doing work cross-culturally. Much as Karen and I love and are loved in our Colombian context, I will never be Colombian. I’ll never completely belong in that place that, as of this year, some of you from this church family now know. And when missionaries return to the country they came from… as some of you can attest … we never exactly fit back in. Living over there has changed us … made us different people.
And, if I can get really personal, I live here in Connecticut on my wife’s home turf. Karen is a local girl. She grew up in Hartford, Wethersfield, Cromwell. Now we live just across the river in Portland. We have this thing that happens to us in the car where we’re going somewhere and she forgets to tell me to turn right until the right turn is back there already. She figures I know where we’re going, but I don’t. I sometimes say to her in exasperation…
Karen, I’m not from here…
I love New England. Living back here is a return gift of something I renounced painfully when my family and I moved to Costa Rica as missionaries back in 1988 after four years in Massachusetts … But I love New England as an insider-outsider. I will never be a true New Englander, just as my family back in Millersburg, Pennsylvania, was never truly from there. That would take another two or three generations. And I don’t have’em!
So I am drawn to these first four verses of this third gospel, this Gospel of Luke. It’s tempting to think that Luke is just kind of clearing his throat in these early verses before getting on with the important stuff at verse 5.
But that would be a mistake. Luke has placed this little introduction here for a reason, and we ought to try to understand what that reason is. I think a close look at these verses will bring new light about the God of Christmas, the Jesus of Christmas, and even about us as we—joyfully, painfully?—celebrate Christmas together this year.
You see, Luke feels the need to justify adding a new report about Jesus. In his time, lots of them already exist.
Luke seems to want this Theophilus to understand both his motivation and his method for adding to the pile of memories and teaching about Jesus. In adding to earlier reports that have served Jesus’ followers and inquirers for a half century already, Luke feels that it’s important for Theophilus to understand why this new project is necessary and how it relates to the accumulation of testimonies and accounts about Jesus that is already a done deal … already available to him and to Theophilus.
I think what he says is important for us also. Let’s look carefully at what Luke writes at the beginning of his work:
First, Luke pays his respects to his forebears in the faith and in the chronicling of Jesus’ words and deeds. He respects them and he honors their testimony.
We see this most obviously in verse 2, where he uses two critical expressions to describe those who have gone before him in the task he himself has now set his hand to.
Let me read those first two verses
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnessesand ministers of the word have delivered them to us…
Luke 1.1-2 (ESV)
Luke kind of tips his hat to these eyewitnesses and these ministers of the word. They’re probably two overlapping groups: The eyewitnesses over here knew what they knew because they’d seen it with their own eyeballs. It was undeniable to them. They’d lived those events in flesh and blood.
And then, over here, there are those who took those testimonies and the teaching of Jesus and served the early Jesus movement as servants of the word.
I think these would have been two overlapping groups.
Not all the eyewitnesses would have had this kind of word-based ministry as their calling. Some of them would have been quiet, everyday believers living local lives of faithful service. And not all these ministers of the word would have been eyewitnesses. Some of them would have come along later and met Jesus in something other than an eyewitness way.
But there’d be an overlap: The apostle John writes like one of the overlap people at the beginning of that little letter that we call First John:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
1 John 1.1-4 (ESV)
Luke is saying to Theophilus, ‘Look, I stand on the shoulders of such people. Luke himself is not an eyewitness and in his double volume (Luke-Acts) he doesn’t style himself as a typical preacher or teacher of the word either.
Luke is repaying a debt here, and I think he does it with some tenderness and affection for the people he’s describing. His faith and the faith of people he cares about wouldn’t exist without this legacy. Luke acknowledges that right at the outset, the way you and I can speak with appreciation of the people who testified of Jesus to us and nurtured us in the faith, even if our lives have long since moved on from those formative moments.
But the second thing I notice in these first verses demands some patience on our part if we’re going to understand Luke: he finds the accumulated mountain of testimony and teaching about Jesus to be … how do I say this diplomatically…inadequate.
Now, let’s pay careful attention to what he’s saying.
He doesn’t say erroneous.
He doesn’t say superficial.
He doesn’t say misleading.
He doesn’t say obsolete.
What he says is something like this: ‘Look, Theophilus, I get you. We’re a little bit alike, you and I. We have this analytical bent about us. We need sequencing. We need order. We need logic. We need to understand the wiring behind the panel and how it works, not just whether the lights go on and the refrigerator keeps things cold and the Internet works.
And this legacy of testimony and teaching about Jesus doesn’t completely meet the need for people like you … and me. Admit it. You and I, we’re different. Not better, not worse. But different.
So here’s what I’ve done.’
Verses 3-4:
…(I)t seemed good to me also, having followed all thingscloselyfor some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.
Luke 1.3-4 ESV)
There are four critical expressions in what I’ve just read that explain Luke’s method. They shed light on what he brings to a table that’s already been abundantly served, on behalf of Theophilus:
…all things (πᾶσιν)
…for some time past (ESV) / from the first (NRSV) (ἄνωθεν)
…closely (α͗κριβῶς)
…orderly (καθεξῆς)
The first three of these expressions describe Luke’s research methods. The last one describes his published work.
His research:
‘All things’: exhaustive
‘From the first’: sequentially
‘Closely’: with attention to detail
His report:
‘Orderly’: in a way that speaks to your habits of reading/consideration/reflection/persuasion.
To what end: (4) that you might have certainty ( ἵνα ἐπιγνῶς: solid confidence, deep understanding) concerning the things you have been taught. Luke’s work doesn’t replace earlier testimony and teaching. Rather, it complements it. It bolsters it. Luke’s approach is a force multiplier in the discipling of Theophilus. It makes what already exists more adequate to Theophilus’ need.
It addresses Theophilus as the person God has created and ‘wired’ him to be without suggesting that he just get by on what works for most people. You see, Luke honors Theophilus, too. He doesn’t consider him a problem to be managed or an annoyance to be tolerated. He addresses him as ‘noble Theophilus’.
Now Luke is about to launch into his own unique retelling of the Christmas story, complete with all sorts of inside scoops that could only have come from him interviewing the people involved. He’s describing his careful method in these first four verses, but he will very soon put the results on display.
His account will very obviously aim at being exhaustive, sequential, detailed and orderly.
Can you see this? Luke’s gospel is a labor of love. That love reaches back to the eyewitnesses and ministers of the word whose shoulders Luke stands upon. And that same love reaches forward to Theophilus, whom Luke longs to see experience a mature certainty or confidence in his own life as a follower of Jesus.
Now there’s an open secret about Theophilus and this is probably the moment for telling it: We don’t have a clue who Theophilus is. It’s one of those names that has a meaning. It means ‘lover of God’ or ‘friend of God’.
Maybe this name belonged to a guy Luke knew and his research is meant to serve that friend. Theophilus is a masculine name, so it would have been a man, not a woman. Or maybe it’s a name that stands in for any lover of God who belongs to that minority of us who need to understand before we can believe and who need to have our hearts and minds well nourished if we’re going to continue to believe. Maybe Theophilus is not a man who lived and died twenty centuries ago … Maybe Theophilus is the 18% of us or whatever it is whose brains work in a way that requires this kind—Doctor Luke’s kind—of information.
In either case, Luke—by the insight of God’s Spirit—has seen Theophilus … has seen us. He has understood us. He has honored us. He has spoken our language, not asked us to just get by, by listening in.
When Luke moves on to talk about the incarnation of God in Jesus—the taking on of the human condition, the taking the form of a servant—he has demonstrated that same servant attitude by taking those of us into account who are different in this way.
The birth of Jesus is good news shaped and shape-able even for those of us who are different.
Even for Theophilus …
Even for Dave …
Perhaps even for you…
Now it may have caught your eye that I have not stopped this morning with Theophilus. The text I have quoted from in Luke in gets to Theophilus by verse 4.
But then, when Luke has finished his preface and launched into his account, there is a verse 5, a verse 6, and a verse 7.
Now Luke is no longer describing his own methodology, he’s already done with that by the end of verse 4. Now he’s telling Jesus’ story.
In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.
Luke 1.5-7 (ESV)
Look where Luke goes first with his fresh account of the story of Jesus. The first chapters of the gospel of Luke are full of the stuff, the content, of personal interviews.
How do we know this?
Well, he’s scooping inside details that were only known to individuals who were alone when the thing they experienced went down. One example is Zechariah’s visitation by the angel when he was ministering alone in the temple. Zechariah happened to be there according to the priestly schedule that assigned him to temple service in the precise moment when totally unexpected stuff begins to happen. Only one of the priests went into that holy space at a time. The door was shut, the people were waiting outside, and it just seemed like Zechariah was taking forever in there (1.21).
But the angel Gabriel’s confrontation of Zechariah, his commissioning of John the Baptist’s childless father into the center of the mission of God, his being struck dumb when he asked the angel for a guarantee, that all went down between Zechariah and this angelic Man of God (Gabriel).
It seems that Luke eventually interviewed Zechariah.
And then there’s Mary’s experience with her own angelic visitation, quoted so often in the Christmas season.
Nobody was around to record those stories except the human beings who experienced them. By telling Zechariah’s story and Mary’s story, and other people’s stories, Luke is adding to our population of ‘eyewitnesses’, as he’s already called such people in verse 2. As he does so—although I have no idea whether he would have thought of it this way—Luke is becoming more and more like those ‘ministers of the word’ that he mentions alongside the eyewitnesses.
But I want to go somewhere very specific with this.
As Luke tells the Christmas story, how does he identify the first interviewees he brings into his account? Let’s look one final time at verses 5-7:
5. In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. 6. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. 7. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.
Luke 1.5-7 (ESV)
I imagine that Elizabeth gave Luke permission to disclose that last … really tender … potentially shameful detail. At least I hope he did. I don’t know what the protocols for such a thing were back then. Luke doesn’t just say ‘but they had no children’ and leave it at that. He locates the problem in Elizabeth’s body. Elizabethwas barren, he says.
As a result of this situation, Zechariah and Elizabeth are—like Theophilus but in a different way—people who are different.
I want to be careful as I describe this, because in a church family like ours infertility is without doubt the painful experience of at least some of us. It’s also one of those losses … in many cases the loss of a dream, the loss of something that was longed for but never possessed … that makes people feel different than their peers, especially in that season of life when their friends seem to be happily producing babies just when they cannot. Commonly, it’s an ache that lasts an entire lifetime.
Zechariah and Elizabeth know that pain. They’re aware that they are different, ‘that old couple with no kids’. And, like Theophilus, they are not left out when God’s redeeming love, made human in the Christ child, invades. They are seen, they are taken into account, they are brought into the story. In their case—unlike what some of us are asked to endure—they are healed, made whole, and gifted with a son.
Throughout this Christmas season, we have been singing that amazing song, O Come, All You Unfaithful. We’ll sing it again in a minute.
O come, all you unfaithful Come, weak and unstable Come, know you are not alone
O come, barren and waiting ones Weary of praying, come See what your God has done
Thanks to our brother Luke, we can now add to this description of those who are invited to come closer to Jesus in this season all of us who for whatever reason ‘have always felt different’. Like Theophilus, and like those of us who kind of are Theophilus. Or for any other reason.
For all of us, it’s time for us to come home.
If ‘feeling different’ in some way describes a burden you’ve carried, wouldn’t it be just like Jesus to draw you and your story into his embrace more tightly than you’ve ever known it. Even into this hospitable family, more fully than you’ve expected.
I began this sermon by breaking one of the cardinal rules of preaching: I talked about myself. Because you’re generally a patient bunch, let me end it in a similar way and let’s call this my testimony. I have breakfast regularly with Brian Hucks, our lead elder here at WEFC.
Because he’s an engineer and I’m a biblical scholar and we’re both guys, we always eat at the same place at the same hour. I always arrive four minutes late. We even sit at the same table, and we generally order the same breakfast we ordered a month ago. It’s just a little bit pathetic, but we like it that way.
Two breakfasts ago—as Brian and I measure time—something took the conversation to a point where I told Brian that, even at our beloved church and mostly because I spend half of each year or more somewhere else, I always feel like a bit of an outsider. I never learn enough of your names. I don’t know your stories. I’m somewhere else when big stuff happens here. I told Brian that I don’t feel as though I really belong yet.
Brian looked stunned. He didn’t interrupt me, probably because he was chewing and even two guys in flannel shirts try not to talk with our mouths full.
But when I gave him a chance he said, ‘Well that is certainly not how any of us sees you’ and he affirmed Karen’s and my belonging in this family.
It was a word from God for me.
It was an invitation to come home. It was like Luke saying to Theophilus, ‘Look, pal, we’ve got a place for you in this Jesus story, let me speak your language to you for a little bit.’
Wouldn’t it just like Jesus to come near to you as you remember the events of Jesus’ birth with this limping community of Jesus-followers?
O come, all you unfaithful Come, weak and unstable Come, know you are not alone
O come, barren and waiting ones Weary of praying, come See what your God has done
Christ is born, Christ is born Christ is born for you
O come, bitter and broken Come with fears unspoken Come, taste of His perfect love
O come, guilty and hiding ones There is no need to run See what your God has done
PRAYER
Our Father, we ask you to bring us all the way into your embrace. Please reduce the distance between us and you down to the vanishing point. Please reduce the distance between each other in that same way.
The language of ‘first and last’, of ‘before and after’, lies near the spinal column of Isaianic dialect. It is deployed throughout the book, though it comes into its own only after the pivot towards redemption that famously occurs in chapter 40.
In the midst of YHWH’s unanticipated cooption of the pagan monarch Cyrus and his ongoing astonishment of the nations, chapter 41 gives us this rendition of the expression to which I refer:
Who has performed and done this, calling the generations from the beginning? I, the LORD, am first, and will be with the last.
Isaiah 41.4 (NRSV)
Perhaps owing to the work’s preference for creative reiteration over redundant repetition, chapter 41’s fourth verse tosses in the preposition את in the second of its two temporal affirmations. Thus, we have ואת־אחרנים // ‘(I am) with the last’ rather than the anticipated ‘I am the last’. There is an alternative view that sees את as a kind of deictic particle rather than the well-known preposition, but let us leave that possibility on the margins for now.
What does YHWH accomplish with this kind of first-and-last assertion of his existence, presence, and activity? It would seem that the claim asserts his mastery over history and therefore the creative privilege that generates the astonishment and marveling which ensue. Theologians might find ‘sovereignty’ preferable to ‘mastery’, though the two affirmations do not lie far from each other.
What it asserts on YHWH’s behalf is not so much the staccato claim that he is ‘in control’, which arguably is fueled more by modern concepts of automation. Rather, YHWH is present in creative orchestration of the events of history, more prone than anyone would expect to introduce unknown instruments, unfamiliar melodies, and unexpected rhythm in the execution of a continually self-enriching kind of artistry.
It would be difficult to exaggerate how noisily this notion of YHWH’s mastery over history collides with pieties that render him predictable and schematizable on the assumption that his future can be mapped out in concrete fashion. Such a reduction of prophetic imagination evacuates YHWH’s purpose of the astonishing and marvelous qualities that prophetic literature and particularly the Isaianic vision claims for it.
YHWH is present from before our retrospective vision fades to the vanishing point and until after our ability to imagine the future’s course evaporates into thin air. This, it seems to me, is the burden of the ‘I am the first and I am the last’ discourse. It urges us to trust in YHWH’s good presence and redemptive activity, while waving us away from the presumption that we know with any precision his ways and means.
The slight variation I have mentioned—which we might gloss as ‘and I am the one who will be with the latter things’—lays the stress on his presumed accompaniment of future events or, more properly, generations. Those events, those generations, are here glimpsed with a curious degree of independence. ‘They will be what they shall be’, we are encouraged to understand, ‘but I will be there, still orchestrating, baton still firmly in hand’.
I find this dynamic and profoundly theocentric view of history and of future, of retrospect and of prospect, a potent theological foundation for theological assessment of the past and for faithful expectation of the future. Like most affirmations that approach credal status, it is generative both in what it says and in that which it refuses to say.
In its shadow, its emaciated imitators look faintly ridiculous.
As the first half of Isaiah draws near to the narrative chapters 36-39—which ominously foreshadow the Babylonian storm that will fall upon Judah—we come upon a chapter of unbroken darkness.
Chapter 34 is not by the book’s standards a long chapter. Yet the reading of these 17 verses feels wearisomely long, for their unceasing pronouncement of doom upon all nations (v. 2) never finds its way to the pivot towards mercy that is so characteristic of this book’s oracles. For an interpreter like this one, alive to the nuanced judgement of YHWH against the nations that becomes a severe mercy for them rather than their mere destruction, this chapter proves difficult to fathom.
Probably, chapter 35 is its pivot, which would explain the lack of a redemptive turning within the bounds of chapter 34 itself. But the hopefulness that blossoms there is directed towards ‘Zion’s cause’. There is no evident inclusion of the nations in its song of restoration and of return.
So, the dark cloud that Isaiah 34 suspends over the nations seems to remain in place. I find this difficult to fit within the trajectory of the book itself. Here one senses the appeal of the bald bifurcation of hope for Zion vis-à-vis judgement for the nations that some readers of Isaiah have seen as its inescapably binary and nationalistic message.
The passage, then, simply summons the people to YHWH’s judgement of them.
Draw near, O nations, to hear; O peoples, give heed! Let the earth hear, and all that fills it; the world, and all that comes from it.
For the LORD is enraged against all the nations, and furious against all their hoards; he has doomed them, has given them over for slaughter.
Isaiah 34.1-2 (NRSV)
The nations are to be slaughtered and their landscape is to be populated by wild animals rather than human beings. And that is all.
If the book of Isaiah, as I believe to be the case, has a bright future for the nations that pivots on their bittersweet but redemptive incorporation into YHWH’s plan for Israel, that hope will not be found in this chapter. In the biblical witness, glorious things are rarely easy and never automatic.
Egypt incarnates cruel irony across the biblical witness.
On the one hand, Egypt is the face, the strong arms that bound the bodies of Jacob’s children to the Hebrews’ iconic slavery. Moses, the Hebrew Bible’s great liberator, freed his people from Egypt after deconstructing his identity as one of Egypt’s princes on the morning he ambled out from the palace grounds and recognized for the first time his suffering Hebrew brothers. Moses then becomes Egypt’s hunted betrayer, the very Pharoah’s long-form adversary when he screws up his courage and allows his self-deprecating shadow to fall on the stones that lay before the Egyptian throne.
Yet these are brute facts, not ironic nuance.
The irony comes in when Egypt becomes the place to flee both famine and invading armies. The oppressor becomes refuge, yet always at a cost. The Isaianic tradition is acutely aware of that price.
Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely (ישענו) on horses, who trust (ויבטחו) in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look (ולא שעו) to the Holy One of Israel or consult (לא דרשו) the LORD!
Yet he too is wise and brings disaster; he does not call back his words, but will rise against the house of the evildoers, and against the helpers of those who work iniquity.
The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit. When the LORD stretches out his hand, the helper will stumble, and the one helped will fall, and they will all perish together.
Isaiah 31:1-3 (NRSV)
Within the trajectory of this prophetic witness, reliance upon Egypt is time and again framed as rejection of YHWH. You can have Egypt’s protection or YHWH’s, but you cannot have both. This is the binary choice in which we are schooled.
One wonders why. Could Egyptian protection against, say, invading Assyrians not be YHWH’s means of sheltering his threatend Hebrews?
Yet Isaiah’s harsh assessment of the Egyptian temptation will not relent. The four italicized verbal expressions and the corresponding Hebrew clauses in the text quoted above deploy four words that are very important to the Isaianic witness as manifestations the human side of the Israel-YHWH relationship: to lean, to trust, to look, to seek or consult. This bit of ironic artistry drives home the mutual exclusivity of trust in Egypt, on the one hand, and trust in YHWH on the other.
The final italicized clause drives home the point.
The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit.
Isaiah 31.3
The prophet’s intuition insists, for reasons it considers obvious or for other reasons it will not not disclose, that to seek refuge in Egypt is to deify the imperium.
The Isaianic version of what has been called the prophet’s ‘quietism’ in the face of existential threat to the nation is of a muscular, either-or, decision-making kind. The prophet knows—and he claims that YHWH does too—that a convenient appeal to means in a moment when everything is at stake is a return to idolatry.
To analyze the claim in this way is not to understand why it must be so. No wonder the people clamored that the prophet should speak to us smoother things than these.
The book called Isaiah is nothing if not disjointed. Yet it is the particular genius of this long scroll that its disjointed nature does not reduce to incoherence. Somehow, at times as though a strong, thrashing swim against the current, Isaiah preserves coherence.
Ariel, or ‘Lion of God’, comes out of nowhere at the outset of Isaiah 29. We are not prepared for this lion’s sudden appearance. Many things about Ariel are unclear, but two will not be dismissed. First, Ariel is a city, ‘the city where David encamped’. Second, Ariel—which we may suspect at the outset is a poignant moniker for Jerusalem—is the object of both the ire and the salvation of YHWH.
Like Israel (ישראל = ‘he struggles with God’ or even ‘God struggles’), Ariel’s is a contested identity.
In the first pericope of chapter 29, as the Hebrew text’s ancient divisions would have it, Ariel meets YHWH’s enmity. In verse two…
Yet I (presumably YHWH) will distress Ariel, and there shall be mourning and lamentation, and (she) shall be to me like an Ariel.
Isaiah 29.2 (NRSV, slightly modified)
Here, God’s lion is stubborn, corralled, perhaps caged. She is a tragicomic figure, no match for YHWH’s might and yet indomitable in her own right.
In time, outside the bounds of this first pericope, Ariel will be rescued by YHWH from the nations that would besiege, ransack, and exterminate her. But Ariel does not yet know this, knows only the self-destructive energy of her leonine verve.
‘Ah, Ariel’, we might groan with the passage’s first words. You fight so long and so hard. You fight against your Maker, who shall in time become your Redeemer.
You are a complex and conflicted city, a lion’s strength and a heart too independent, too rebellious for its own good.
Just over the horizon lies the promise that YHWH will defend Ariel from those imperious nations bent on her dismemberment.
But not yet.
And so, recognizing ourselves in Ariel, in a moment of lucidity, we cry with the text’s opening words …
Readers of these reflections will be familiar with the employment of the serpent to represent personalized evil, not least because such a creature populates the earliest pages of the Hebrew Bible. In a section of the book of Isaiah that seems to stand on the shoulders of discrete ‘oracles against the nations’ in order to glimpse resistance to YHWH’s purpose at more cosmic level, the Isaiah scroll does the same.
Chapter 27 begins with an exceedingly brief oracle, which I quote here both in Hebrew and in English.
On that day the LORD with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.
Isaiah 27:1 (BHS and NRSV)
The oracle begins with the familiar and non-specific glance toward an unspecified future: ביום ההוא // ֹon that day. But instead of the usual particulars about a specific national adversary, we find YHWH armed as a warrior attacking a snake.
One detects a curious three-part symmetry. YHWH’s sword is ‘his cruel and great and strong sword’. His doomed adversary is Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent … the dragon that is in the sea.’ It may be significant that it is not YHWH himself but rather YHWH’s sword that stands parallel to this enemy. Biblical monotheism is usually written in the cursive of incomparability, and incomparability itself can be declared bluntly or subtly.
I assume that twice-named Leviathan and התנִין (NRSV’s the dragon) are one and the same. YHWH here makes war with a principal adversary, not two.
It is the description of the creature that concerns me most: fleeing … twisting … in the sea.
Not a purveyor of arbitrary parallelism but rather a poetic work of subtle interplay, the book called Isaiah is likely saying something important about the nature of cosmic opposition to YHWH’s purpose, something that presses into the serpent metaphor in order to build upon its possibilities.
First, the serpent is ברח / fleeing. When our eyes, figuratively speaking, fall upon Leviathan, YHWH’s might has already landed in force. Second, the serpent is עקלתון / twisting. One might consider that the descriptor aims chiefly to build upon the fear-engendering movement of a snake. I think, however, that the adjective serves to connote that Leviathan the serpent is difficult to subdue. While such a reading may seem to stand in opposition to the three-part invincibility of YHWH’s sword, it could just as well serve as a touch of Isaianic realism about the nature of opposition to YHWH’s counsel, its tenacity and destructiveness more than evident throughout the oracles against the nations and this more ‘apocalyptic’ section that follows upon them.
Finally, we come to התנין / the dragon. This third of three adjectival clauses turns concretely positional or locative. Israelite cosmology famously assigns to the sea the resonance that is proper to a chaotic, threatening, virtually untamable entity. Here it becomes the dragon’s—and, as I have argued, Leviathan’s—home. If this serpent does not customarily live in the sea—an interpretation I think likely reflects the figure’s intention—he flees to it.
Regardless, YHWH’s sword will be the end of it. The verb in question is no longer the semantically open פקד, commonly in contexts like this one, to visit or to punish (so NRSV). Rather, it is הרג / to kill, an unambiguously lethal brand of punishment. Leviathan, we are told in this briefest of oracles, this fleeing, twisting serpent, shall ‘on that day’ be no more.
Then, if editorial sequencing is to be honored, we read of a vineyard like no other. Its attentive viticulturist has no anger. He almost has to cry out for an enemy to dare to present itself, such is the blooming peace of the place.
In one of the book of Isaiah’s most quoted exclamations, the sixth verse of chapter 9 announces the astonishing birth of a consequential child:
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9.6 (ESV)
I have italicized the first of four ‘throne names’, as they are often understood to be, of this royally endowed child. The now very traditional ‘Wonderful Counselor’ represents פלא יועץ, a somewhat enigmatic descriptor that might more literally be rendered ‘a wonder of a counselor’ or even ‘a wonder, a counselor’. ‘Wonderful Counselor’ is not a bad translation, but my interest in making this clarification lies in the juxtaposition of the two Hebrew words, פלא (‘wonder) and יועץ (‘counselor’). A too fast reification of their meaning might us to overlook the supple play of the two words in Isaianic context. It might also be noted that, from an interpretative point of view, the choice of small or capital letters generally corresponds to the theological commitments of the translator(s).
Both words are meaningfully deployed in the first half of the book. With a curious tenacity, the two are repeatedly linked.
In the doxological eruption that begins in chapter 25 and is sustained for several chapters, the combination of wonder and counsel that is established by the linkage of the two words occurs with a certain intensity. This is likely done with programmatic intent, since the paired words appear in the section’s very first verse.
O LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things (כי עשית פלא עצות), plans formed of old, faithful and sure.
Isaiah 25.1 (ESV)
Then, with apparent reference to YHWH’s ‘strange work’ of Zion’s painful redemption, we find the combination once more.
This also comes from the LORD of hosts; he is wonderful in counsel (הפליא עצה) and excellent in wisdom.
Isaiah 28:29 (ESV)
Finally, the sequence is crowned by a verse where the absence of עצה is compensated by the rapid-fire reiteration of פלא.
The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote; so I will again do amazing things (להפליא) with this people, shocking and amazing (הפליא ופלא). The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden.
Isaiah 29.13-14 (NRSV)
Any assessment of what I have been describing must take into account two features that cohabitate amidst a tension that is critical to the soul of the Isaianic burden. First, עצה (‘[to]) counsel’) as a verb and as a noun establishes that YHWH’s way with his Israel and his nations aligns with a determined and previously existing purpose. In this sense, YHWH’s purposeful counsel flows from his stable center. It is not chaotic and not—at least from a divine and therefore a prophetic point of view—serendipitous. One thinks here of the use of the verb קום, deployed in Isaiah to announce that human machinations against Zion and other aspects of YHWH’s purpose shall not stand. Such rustlings of rebellious hearts are doomed from the start, no matter impressions to the contrary, precisely because they contravene YHWH’s counsel or purpose.
Second, the outworking of the divine counsel/purpose regularly astonishes human beings, who have no automatic access to it. This is where פלא serves to underscore that the settled, unstoppable purpose of YHWH is a source of continual surprise to those who are caught up in its concretization. This is so particularly for Israel/Jacob, but hints of gentile ‘marveling’ or ‘wondering’ are not absent from the texts.
It is inconceivable to me that we should not read chapter nine’s ‘wonderful counselor’ in the light of this subsequent florescence of the word-pair and ancillary expressions that use just one of the two. The child that ‘has been born to us’ in chapter nine is not merely a particularly gifted advisor or empath, as English translations might lead one to conclude. Rather, he is an agent of the divine purpose, destined in the execution of YHWH’s counsel to surprise and astonish. This scion of the court of David’s house—as Isaiah 9 appears almost certainly to identify him—is drawn into both the premeditation and the redemption of YHWH in ways that make eventual framing of Mary’s son in his light an interesting interpretative move, even perhaps for those who do not share the shepherds’ doxological impulse as they assimilate the news of that baby’s birth (Luke 2.20). Even she, the third evangelist tells us, ‘treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart’ (Luke 2.19, ESV). Perhaps we are not wrong to wonder whether this new mother, though read into the divine purpose by way of angelic visitation, considered its unlikely realization in her own womb and now at her breast the most unimaginable of paths for the divine counsel to tread.
Las primeras palabras del cuadragésimo primer capítulo de Isaías convocan a las naciones en aras de la justicia.
Pocas veces en el libro llamado Isaías resulta más difícil determinar con precisión el tono de la invitación y el matiz de la palabra hebrea משׁפט, que suele traducirse como “justicia”, pero a veces como “juicio”. Subrayo la frase pertinente:
Guardad silencio ante mí, costas, y renueven sus fuerzas los pueblos; acérquense y entonces hablen, juntos vengamos a juicio.
Isaías 41:1 (LBLA)
Dos rasgos de esta invocación la vinculan a pasajes similares que implican a Israel/Jacob/Judá en lugar de, como aquí, “costas” y “pueblos”. La primera, más débil que su sucesora, es la débil similitud entre “juntos vengamos a juicio” y la expresión más famosa que precede a la condena de YHVH a Judá y Jerusalén en el capítulo introductorio del libro:
Venid ahora, y razonemos —dice el Señor— aunque vuestros pecados sean como la grana, como la nieve serán emblanquecidos; aunque sean rojos como el carmesí, como blanca lana quedarán.
Isaías 1:18 (LBLA)
Aunque los contextos de los dos pasajes son sorprendentemente similares y el lenguaje también, hay que admitir que los verbos clave no son los mismos. Es posible que la similitud sea meramente superficial. Sin embargo, a la luz del irrefrenable deseo de la tradición isaística de jugar y burlarse de las alusiones intertextuales, es probable que no lo sea. Probablemente, la convocatoria de Judá para un momento deliberativo de sentencia encuentra aquí eco en la convocatoria de las naciones para un objetivo algo diferente que, sin embargo, pivota sobre la cuestión de la justicia.
Guardad silencio ante mí, costas, y renueven sus fuerzas los pueblos; acérquense y entonces hablen, juntos vengamos a juicio.
Isaías 41:1 (LBLA)
Podría decirse que esta posibilidad se ve corroborada por un segundo rasgo irónico de este pasaje, también una cuestión de alusión intertextual, pero ahora con un compañero textual que se encuentra muy cerca.
Una vez más, se trata de un texto de Isaías que sólo puede considerarse famoso:
¿Acaso no lo sabes? ¿Es que no lo has oído? El Dios eterno, el Señor, el creador de los confines de la tierra no se fatiga ni se cansa. Su entendimiento es inescrutable.
El da fuerzas al fatigado, y al que no tiene fuerzas, aumenta el vigor.
Aun los mancebos se fatigan y se cansan, y los jóvenes tropiezan y vacilan, pero los que esperan en el Señor renovarán sus fuerzas; se remontarán con alas como las águilas, correrán y no se cansarán, caminarán y no se fatigarán.
Isaías 40:28-31 (LBLA)
Debemos recordar que estas palabras se producen inmediatamente antes de Isaías 41. Una cierta conclusión culminante y, por supuesto, una versificación moderna las separan de nuestro texto, pero eso es todo.
En 40:28-31, aquellos hijos e hijas de Jacob/Israel que se quejan de que su camino se ha perdido a los ojos de un YHVH desatento reciben la seguridad de que, si esperan en YHVH, renovarán sus fuerzas. La expresión hebrea que genera la cursiva arriba es יחליפו כח. Ésta es precisamente la expresión que se usa de las “costas” y, por implicación contextual, también de “los pueblos” en 41:1. En 40:31, la expresión se toma como imperfecto con una referencia futura; es decir, describe. En 41:1, las mismas palabras se entienden correctamente en su forma yusiva, un detalle que debo intentar aclarar citando de nuevo, poniendo en cursiva e insertando el texto hebreo correspondiente.
Guardad silencio ante mí, costas, y renueven sus fuerzas los pueblos (יחליפו כח); acérquense y entonces hablen, juntos vengamos a juicio.
Isaías 41:1 (LBLA)
Estas sutiles ironías deben representar sin duda algo más que un juego de palabras realizado con un fin puramente estético. Cada vez estoy más convencido de que la voz isaística está atrayendo a las naciones hacia la difícil situación y las perspectivas del propio Israel/Jacob. Los propósitos de YHVH al redimir a su Israel parecen incluir cada vez más a las naciones, sin desdibujar nunca las distinciones entre ambas ni traspasar los límites de estas últimas.
Parece cada vez más probable que al convocar a las naciones para el juicio, sus intenciones sean -como con Israel- no finalmente letales sino más bien restauradoras.
Cuando se recibe una invitación como ésta, con todas sus tonalidades isaísticas, nunca se sabe exactamente para qué.
En general, el testimonio bíblico atesora el legado de Ezequías. Se le recuerda como un buen rey en medio de muchos otros malos. Se le honra con lo que desde nuestra distancia parece una amistad genuina con el profeta Isaías, que parece haber disfrutado de un profundo acceso a la corte real de Ezequías.
Sin embargo, el realismo bíblico es algo tenaz, que araña cuando debe incluso la refinada reputación de sus protagonistas. Ezequías será recordado con todos sus defectos.
El capítulo trigésimo noveno del libro llamado Isaías es de lo más ominoso. Es sólo cuestión de tiempo que los babilonios bramen borrachos sobre las ruinas de Jerusalén junto a sus mercenarios edomitas. Sin embargo, aquí encontramos a sus emisarios disfrutando de un recorrido por los recintos del templo durante la visita que el recién recuperado Ezequías ha organizado vertiginosamente para ellos. El texto no deja entrever que Ezequías tenga ni idea del oscuro presagio que acecha su despistada extravagancia.
Pero el profeta sí.
Entonces el profeta Isaías vino al rey Ezequías, y le dijo: ¿Qué han dicho esos hombres y de dónde han venido a ti? Y Ezequías respondió: Han venido a mí de un país lejano, de Babilonia. Y él dijo: ¿Qué han visto en tu casa? Y Ezequías respondió: Han visto todo lo que hay en mi casa; no hay nada entre mis tesoros que yo no les haya mostrado.
Isaías 9:3-4 (LBLA)
En este punto, uno podría anticipar el surgimiento del remordimiento real, una sombría determinación de cerrar las escotillas para contrarrestar el subterfugio de los invitados babilonios de Ezequías y la tormenta que sin duda pronto se desataría sobre Jerusalén.
Nada de esto ocurre.
Entonces Isaías dijo a Ezequías: Oye la palabra del Señor de los ejércitos: «He aquí, vienen días cuando todo lo que hay en tu casa y todo lo que tus padres han atesorado hasta el día de hoy, será llevado a Babilonia; nada quedará» —dice el Señor. «Y algunos de tus hijos que saldrán de ti, los que engendrarás, serán llevados y serán oficialesen el palacio del rey de Babilonia». Entonces Ezequías dijo a Isaías: La palabra del Señor que has hablado es buena. Pues pensaba: Porque habrá paz y seguridad en mis días.
Isaías 9:5-8 (LBLA)
Una gran tristeza impregna esta patética viñeta. Su tristeza es tanto más conmovedora por ser la última palabra de la primera mitad del libro. Las siguientes palabras, justo al otro lado de la frontera y en lo que para nosotros es su cuadragésimo capítulo, son palabras sobre el consuelo de Sión después de que el exilio babilónico -sí, estos babilonios– haya causado estragos.
El error de Ezequías empaña para siempre su memoria.
Se registra aquí en dos chocantes respuestas a la revancha que recibe del profeta Isaías. En primer lugar, su respuesta a la pregunta de Isaías sobre el error fatal que acaba de cometer es un tanto simplista.
Y él (Isaías) dijo: ¿Qué han visto en tu casa? Y Ezequías respondió: Han visto todo lo que hay en mi casa; no hay nada entre mis tesoros que yo no les haya mostrado.
Isaías 9:4 (LBLA)
En segundo lugar, los pies de barro de Ezequías son monstruosamente visibles en la conclusión del capítulo, que, como hemos visto, sirve también para las palabras finales de toda la primera mitad del libro. No es un espectáculo agradable.
Aquí de nuevo, ese pasaje, con la torpeza moral de Ezequías en cursiva:
Entonces Isaías dijo a Ezequías: Oye la palabra del Señor de los ejércitos: «He aquí, vienen días cuando todo lo que hay en tu casa y todo lo que tus padres han atesorado hasta el día de hoy, será llevado a Babilonia; nada quedará» —dice el Señor. «Y algunos de tus hijos que saldrán de ti, los que engendrarás, serán llevados y serán oficialesen el palacio del rey de Babilonia». Entonces Ezequías dijo a Isaías: La palabra del Señor que has hablado es buena. Pues pensaba: Porque habrá paz y seguridad en mis días.
Isaías 39:5-8 (LBLA)
De hecho, no hay nada bueno en la sombría advertencia de Isaías, excepto que el propio Ezequías será enterrado en paz en un momento en que las nubes de tormenta aún no se han desatado sobre su pueblo. Sólo el peor de los narcisistas -el tipo de rey que él manifiestamente no ha sido- podría encontrar consuelo en ello.
Canter Bridge 