Isaiah’s generative vision, as I see it, loads prophetic shoulders with an almost unbearable weight.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’
And he said, ‘Go and say to this people: “Keep listening (שמעו שמוע), but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.”
Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears (ובאזניו ישמע) and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’
Isaiah 6:8-10 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)
The cessation of visual and aural acuity, even if the theme does not originate in this vision as I believe that it does, flourishes across the book via frequent retouchings. Ordinarily in Isaiah, the predictable result of the people’s sensory loss a tragic is a tragic failure to understand. Willful refusal to see and to hear in the Isaianic vision eventually produces the inability to do so. The people become fools.
But not forever.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me (שמעו שמוע אלי), and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me; listen (שמעו), so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.
Isaiah 55.2-3 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)
Such reiteration, thematic and lexical, does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, the text indulges in classic Isaianic reversal of the earlier theme of lost audition. Now, YHWH’s command through his prophet is not to fail to hear and so to stumble about stupidly into alienation from Jacob’s God. Rather, the listening—notice the same verbal combination around the root שמע and the repetition of ‘ear’ (אזן)—produces a feast and the inclining of the ear overcomes Judah’s erstwhile alienation from YHWH and brings life.
Any close reading of the text will—or should—service this play of concept and of word.
What lingers just below the surface is more easily missed. The trope of the ignorant nation persists and survives into this text, notwithstanding its location fairly late in the book. But now the allusion is fragrant with redemptive development.
See, I made (David) a witness to the peoples (לאומים), a leader and commander for the peoples (לאמים).
See, you shall call nations (גוי) that you do not know (לא־תדע), and nations (וגוי) that do not know you (לא ידוך) shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
Isaiah 55.4-5 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)
Laying aside for the moment consideration of David’s unexpected (and, strictly speaking, unkingly) presence here, both Israel and the nations find themselves joined in ironic ignorance. It is a momentary, indeed imaginary, ignorance, because it is barely named and contemplated before it is erased.
Israel and the nations are viewed as mutually uncomprehending of each other’s reality. One need not imagine that they are unaware of the other’s existence. Rather, one might say that Israel and the nations cannot and do not understand each other.
Yet this mutual inscrutability is glimpsed in its ultimate moment precisely because Israel has now consciously become the Convener of Nations and those peoples, for their part, come running to Israel. The people’s sudden attractiveness is all YHWH’s work: for he has glorified you.
Isaiah’s ironic currents and undercurrents in a text like this run in more than one direction but not at cross purposes.
The picture is a stunning recapacitation of Israel’s ability to see, hear, and comprehend, a glorification of Jacob’s erstwhile deaf and dumb children that restores their Abrahamic purpose and brings the nations running toward them and to their God.
The streaming of the nations to Zion that has been a kind of percussive beat from chapter two forward here takes on the profile of an astonishingly international reconciliation. Israel, true to form, becomes both agent and participant in YHWH’s redemptive purpose without ever, for one moment, losing her accent amid the swirling onrush of suddenly eager peoples.
It is too easy from a comfortably remote position to criticize the versification of the Hebrew Bible that is a legacy of Middle Ages scholarship. Usually, close inspection throws up considerations that explain the decisions that were made, even when they do not entirely justify them.
Still, the bifurcation of the fourth ‘servant song’ and its collocation across two chapters (Isaiah 52.13—53.12) is an indefensible tragedy. The piece simply must be read as a unity.
When one does so—happily, the editors of the NRSV and other modern Bibles encourage the reader in this direction—a number of high-level observations become possible. I deal with just one of them in this moment.
The opening line is breathtaking in its identification of YHWH’s servant with one of the key components of YHWH-elevating vocabulary in Isaiah.
הנה ישכיל עבדי ירום ונשא וגבהּ מאד See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.
Isaiah 52.13 (NRSV, emphasis added)
In the light of the trauma that YHWH’s servant endures in the subsequent verses, it was perhaps necessary to clarify from the outset that the adventure ends well. Nevertheless, the terms of the exaltation represent a stunning application of Isaianic YHWH descriptors to the servant himself.
I refer here to ירום ונשא (‘he shall be exalted and lifted up’). Apart from ‘the Holy One of Israel’, the language of רם ונשא is the Isaiah tradition’s preferred language for specifying YHWH’s incomparability. The two words are applied to YHWH’s throne in what I consider to be programmatic fashion in the generative vision at 6.1. After dozens of instances in which the two terms (and even more often, one or the other) is artfully maneuvered, רם ונשא becomes something very near to an alternative name for YHWH himself.
For thus says the high and lofty one (כי כה אמר רם ונשא) who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite.
Isaiah 57.15 (NRSV, emphasis and interpolated Hebrew text added)
The climactic and most famous fourth servant song—a designation that is unfortunate chiefly for its marginalization of servant motifs that fall outside of their arbitrarily drawn lines—thus declares in its opening syllables a remarkable elevation of the servant. It seems to me best to see this as an inclusion of YHWH’s servant within the counsel or purpose (עצה) of YHWH himself.
The suffering of the servant is then made all the more astonishing, not least his unenviable plight of being crushed by YHWH himself, because it sits so uncomfortably alongside the opening declaration that YHWH’s servant occupies YHWH-like conceptual altitudes and acquires via an eventual elevation YHWH-like majesty (if this is how the yiqtol + v-qatal + v-qatal sequence in 52.12 imply).
No wonder, then, the enduring fascination across religious boundaries of this irrepressibly evocative poem.
Isaiah’s fifty-first chapter weaves together a refreshingly positive description of its audience with an insistent summons to pay attention. Indeed, the chapter begins in just this fashion, stating its direction from the very outset. In the following extracts from chapter 51, I will italicize the verbal summons and emphasize the addressee descriptions in bold.
Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the LORD. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you…
Isaiah 51.1-2a (NRSV)
Then just a few verses later:
Listen to me, my people, and give heed to me, my nation...
Isaiah 51.4a (NRSV)
The third summons elides the expected vocative descriptors:
Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath…
Isaiah 51.6a (NRSV)
Yet the addressee/vocative descriptors soon resume:
Listen to me, you who know righteousness, you people who have my teaching in your hearts; do not fear the reproach of others, and do not be dismayed when they revile you.
Isaiah 51.7 NRSV)
After an interlude where it is ‘the arm of the Lord’ rather than the people that is addressed imperativally, the established pattern is taken up again:
Rouse yourself, rouse yourself!Stand up, O Jerusalem…
Isaiah 51.17a (NRSV)
It is important to observe that the pattern continues well into chapter 52. Its last appearance in the chapter before us initiates a trend towards recognizing the addressees’ trauma and vulnerability, which flows meaningfully toward the famous ‘fourth servant song’, where YHWH’s servant does in fact fall wounded under YHWH’s own blow.
Therefore hear this, you who are wounded, who are drunk, but not with wine…
Isaiah 51.21 (NRSV)
When literature erects structural markers as evident as these, any valid reading must take them into account and bow to their programmatic purpose. The evidence highlighted above invites the reader to contemplate the addressees as the favored people of YHWH, though perhaps more specifically a subsection of that people that has been particularly attentive to instruction and peculiarly concerned with YHWH’s ‘righteousness’ and ‘justice’. Their rescue from calamity is imminent. Though they hope to see it, trepidation in the face of impediments to their redemption may restrain them from bold participation, this against the current of ‘my Torah’ (51.7) which the people have in their hearts. This description is gleaned from the descriptors I highlighted abovein bold.
The italicised portions, for their part, seem in the aggregate to summon the people to consider the ancient and enduring purpose of YHWH to bless them. They are urged to interpret their recent calamity not as the elimination of that divine purpose but rather as an especially painful but temporary interruption that will soon be superseded by the resumption of the promise.
If this reading adequately comprehends the text’s structure, then one might see chapter 51 (continuing into chapter 52) as a prophetic broadside against what we moderns call ‘recency bias’. From the soul of the Isaianic vision emerges the claim that YHWH’s purpose has always been to bless, that he has not turned permanently against his people, and that faith in the ancient teaching must now assume the posture of courage.
On the basis of this understanding, the even more vibrant summons that await the reader in chapter 52 find their grounded meaning.
Awake, awake, put on your strength, O Zion! Put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city; for the uncircumcised and the unclean shall enter you no more.
Shake yourself from the dust, rise up, O captive Jerusalem; loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter Zion!
The reading tradition reflected in our Masoretic Text separates 49.7 off from 49.1-6. Additionally, 49.7 begins with a ‘speaker marker’ (‘Thus says YHWH…’) that has evidently been regarded as a gentle separator of what follows from what has gone before.
Nevertheless, the content of 49.7 all but clamors to be read in relationship with verses 1-6.
The chapter’s first section presents the servant of YHWH protesting his own fatigue and incapacity for large tasks.
And (YHWH) said to me, ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.’
But I said, ‘I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the LORD, and my reward with my God.’
Isaiah 49.3-4 (NRSV)
Curiously, YHWH’s response is to inform his servant of the even larger mission that lies before him.
And now the LORD says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the LORD, and my God has become my strength—he says, ‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’
Isaiah 49.5-6
The displacement of the ‘tribes of Jacob’ as the be-all and end-all of the servant’s commission in favor of a greater mission to illuminate ‘the nations’ is so radical a departure from expectation that the translator of Septuagint Isaiah will not abide it. The Greek translation of Hebrew Isaiah was executed for the sake of Greek-speaking Jewish communities in Egypt at about 150 years B.C.E. The individual charged with the monumental task of rendering the Hebrew Isaiah scroll in Greek evidently can not bring himself to disparage the mission of YHWH’s servant to dispersed Jews. Instead of the Hebrew text’s vision of the servant’s restoration of Israel as a ‘small thing’, the Septuagint translator offers us:
And he said to me, ‘It is a great thing for you to be called my servant so that you may set up the tribes of Iakob and turn back the dispersion of Israel.’
Isaiah 49.6 (NETS, emphasis added to reflect emphasis in Greek text)
Returning to the Hebrew text, verse 7—the indication of a new paragraph notwithstanding—appears to address the conundrum that is established when a global commission is laid upon such weary shoulders. After all, it is not merely the case that the servant has protested his own exhaustion, admittedly alongside his confidence that YHWH’s provision is sufficient (v. 4). It is also the case that the servant in his profound identification with Jacob’s exiled tribes cannot claim much credibility among the nations whom his exertions are meant to enlighten.
Notwithstanding, the prophet has YHWH adumbrate yet another Isaianic reversal of fortunes that will implicate the servant’s exhaustion and his lack of credibility among gentiles.
Thus says the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, ‘Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.’
Isaiah 49.7 (NRSV)
One senses here the innate tension between restoration of a lost and longed-for stasis, on the one hand, and the incursion of an entirely new arrangement, on the other. The prophet intuits a reversal so profound that the servant cum Israel will soon stand at the very head of the now submissive nations.
Yet the tensions are felt in multiple directions rather than just one. If it seemed for a moment that restoration of Jacob/Israel was too small a matter, it now appears that Jacob is to be quite grand as kings and princes stand to honor her and bow to submit to her.
What is more, the relationship between the illumination of the nations and their submission to Jacob/Israel is a complex matter, one that I think plays a part in a wider argument that the gentile nations’ reconfigured and submissive relationship to Israel is intended for their well-being and is therefore to be welcomed by them.
In the light of such a complex and radical promise, it is no wonder that Isaiah’s recurring plea is that little Jacob should forget the former things and open heart and mind to a new thing. The prophet’s imagined future, it would seem, could not exist without the remembered past. Yet neither can it remain defined by what Israel has known thus far. Or experienced. Or been.
The trope ‘daughter (of) Zion’ and others that share the same structure are all but a signature mark of the Isaianic tradition. The parentheses around ‘of’ are required by the fact that ‘daughter’ (בת) appears in the construct state, a phenomenon that commonly links one noun into a possessive relationship with an immediately following noun.
So, if we are to take our cues from ordinary prose usage, בת ציון would mean ‘Zion’s daughter’ or ‘the daughter of Zion’. The construction is used as well with Gallim, Tarshish, Sidon, Babylon, and of course Jerusalem.
Scholars have lingered over the precise meaning we should ascribe to the expression. In my view, the notion of the ‘appositional genitive’ is the most persuasive. This understanding eschews the notion of possession, which places both בת and the subsequent name of a people or place on the same plane. The result is helpfully describe in a recent work on Lamentations in this way:
As an appositional genitive, the phrasing would mean that Zion as a type of daughter is respected and dear, which yields a sense that is more or less equivalent to the metaphorical sense for which Magnar Kartveit has recently argued … In such usage, the poet depicts the city as a vulnerable and devastated young woman, thus heightening once again the pathos of the poetry. Its use intends to evoke emotion rather than description … A translation more along the lines of ’tender or dearest Jerusalem/Zion’, then captures well the vulnerability and defencelessness of the city.
Jill Middlemas, Lamentations: an introduction and study guide. T&T Clark (2021), 27-28.
In the passage before us, it is not Daughter Zion but rather Daughter Babylon/Chaldea that arrests our gaze.
Come down and sit in the dust, virgin daughter Babylon (בתולת בת־בבל)! Sit on the ground without a throne, daughter Chaldea (בת־כשדים)! For you shall no more be called tender and delicate.
Take the millstones and grind meal, remove your veil, strip off your robe, uncover your legs, pass through the rivers.
Your nakedness shall be uncovered, and your shame shall be seen. I will take vengeance, and I will spare no one.
Our Redeemer—the LORD of hosts is his name— is the Holy One of Israel.
Sit in silence, and go into darkness, daughter Chaldea (בת־כשדים)! For you shall no more be called the mistress of kingdoms (גברת ממלכות).
I was angry with my people, I profaned my heritage; I gave them into your hand, you showed them no mercy; on the aged you made your yoke exceedingly heavy.
You said, ‘I shall be mistress forever (גברת עד),’ so that you did not lay these things to heart or remember their end.
Isaiah 47.1-7 (NRSV, emphasis and interpolated Hebrew added)
A number of details require scrutiny. First, the clustering of ‘daughter of…’ instances is not precisely unprecedented, but it does not fail to be remarkable. Additionally, the first ‘daughter of…’ phrase in verse 1 adds the descriptor ‘virgin’, which produces NRSV’s ‘virgin daughter Babylon’. This addition—again, not unprecedented in the Isaiah scroll—appears to underscore the motif of tenderness, innocence, and vulnerability.
Second, the succession of three instances of ‘(virgin) daughter (Babylon/Chaldea)’ with two of ‘mistress’ (גברת) places both female metaphors in a context where each can only be interpreted in the light of the whole. If, as I have suggested, the daughter metaphor denotes a people’s youth and vulnerability, the deployment of ‘mistress’ depicts the same people’s haughty maturity. The juxtaposition of the two invites the reader to imagine Babylon/Chaldea across the range of her feminine trajectory from a sharply ironic angle. In both cases, the woman in question shall be utterly humiliated.
Third, the tone—as I have intimated just above—is savagely ironic. The entire oracle is an artifact of te vengeance literature. The prophet appears to speak of empathy for a young, vulnerable, tender girl, on the one hand, and admiration for a regal woman, on the other. In fact, the prophet witholds both—empathy and admiration—in the interest of demeaning the Babylonian captor that has been Israel’s tormentor.
In point of fact, Babylon/Chaldea has never in Israel’s experience been tender or vulnerable. Nor has the imperium been the object of admiration, though fear has manifestly been the posture of Judah’s heart as the Babylonian shadow has crept closer. As the ‘mistress of kingdoms’ (גברת ממלכות) and the ‘mistress forever’ (גברת עד, overriding with many the Masoretic accentuation and syntax), Babylon in the prophet’s view is powerful and long-lived only in appearance. In fact, in the face of YHWH’s rage, the empire will soon be brought low. Her inability to respond to Judah’s plight with mercy and her cruelty towards Judah’s most vulnerable (v. 6)—even though it was YHWH who delivered Judah into her hands—has assured her eventual disgrace.
Unaware of her impending doom (v. 7), Lady Babylon for the moment rides high. But not for long. The particularly acid humor of the powerless surges to flood tide in this text, a perspective that claims to know more than appearances claim. If YHWH is indeed ‘our Redeemer’, ‘the Lord of Hosts’, ‘the Holy One of Israel’, (v. 4)—so the prophet exhorts Judah to consider—things could hardly be otherwise. Imperial pretension shall not stand.
Biblical monotheism pivots on the concept of incomparability.
Its spokespersons seem uninterested in emptying the skies of other beings, indeed we are at points allowed a glimpse of quite populated skies. But none of whoever else may exist ‘out there’ is to be compared with YHWH. He is unique. He is incomparable. He is the only one of his kind.
The book of Isaiah grows quite fierce about the matter.
I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god. I arm you, though you do not know me, so that they may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is no one besides me; I am the LORD, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.
Isaiah 45.5-7 (NRSV, emphasis added)
YHWH is here addressing Cyrus, the pagan king whom he has taken by the arm as his closest ally. Cyrus is not allowed fully into YHWH’s counsel, indeed he appears largely ignorant of the Big Thing of which he has become a protagonist.
But the prophet is jealous that YHWH’s incomparability be acknowledged from one horizon to the other. This is biblical monotheism at its most assertive. It is common to Isaiah but rather consistent across the biblical text. YHWH’s uniqueness is not merely an abstract point that people who worry about such things might care to ponder. It is instead a reality that must be, will be, universally acknowledged.
I have included in the above quotation the words that are presented to us as the chapter’s seventh verse.
I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.
Isaiah 45.7
It would be easy to read this as a new thought that a piecemeal text has pushed up against an earlier idea with no necessary connection between the two. However, it would be unlike the book of Isaiah to engage in such arbitrariness.
It seems more likely that the kind of monotheism that is here claimed on behalf of reality itself relieves Israel of looking for other powers, the existence of whom might explain the bad stuff that the people have experienced. Or if not relieve, then oblige.
If YHWH in his sovereign mastery over creation and history is unique and incomparable, then one had better seek causality in him rather than in several. Such a totalistic monotheism quite frankly creates philosophical, even ethical dilemmas, that will not be evaded.
But from the prophet’s perspective, at leave one knows where one must go for answers.
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.
Canter Bridge 