The book called Isaiah insists on counterposing fear to faith. Or, better put, fear to trust in YHWH.
It is arguably the most persistent binary in the book. If Israel could manage a reliable glimpse of how things actually work, we are led to believe in a hundred places, they would quite naturally trust this sovereign YHWH who has called them his own and vowed to secure their survival and their eventual flourishing.
But Israel (in the dialect of ‘Jacob’, ‘Judah’, ‘Zion’, ‘Jerusalem’, ’the house of David’, and similar monikers) does not acquire that view, does not give herself to such trust, cannot cease to fear one overlord or another.
She does not earn the prophet’s sympathy for this shortcoming. Instead, Isaiah holds his people accountable for what the book considers a culpable failure rightly to decide where she will place her trust.
The book’s portrayal of misplaced fear becomes, at turns, quite impressive.
In the days of Ahaz son of Jotham son of Uzziah, king of Judah, King Rezin of Aram and King Pekah son of Remaliah of Israel went up to attack Jerusalem, but could not mount an attack against it. When the house of David heard that Aram had allied itself with Ephraim, the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.”
Isaiah 7:1–2 (NRSV)
The mindless shaking of trees against the wind becomes picturesque foil and contrast to the solid reliability of YHWH, on the one hand, and the anchored steadiness of a people who trusts in him, on the other.
Soon we hear YHWH’s prophet declare with regard to the conspiracy of the neighboring nations that unsettle the Davidic king and his subjects in this moment…
It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass.
In its context, this declaration does not bring good news, for Ahaz and his court find themselves incapable of responding aright.
For the moment we are left with the unsettling image of Judah, light as a feather, set to trembling by the slightest breeze, self-victimizing object rather than decisive subject.
The image shapes its reader to understand what constitutes the opposite of faith in the Isaianic vision: Israel trusts. Or Israel trembles.
The cryptic oracle that constitutes this shortest chapter in the book called Isaiah serves up one of the Isaianic tradition’s most beguiling combinations.
The prophet and the proclaimers of his message love to fuse the notion of survivors/remnant, on the one hand, to that of beauty/glory on the other. In fact, the book of Isaiah would not be what it is if this odd alchemy did not lie at its heart.
It’s worthwhile to quote in full three of the chapter’s six verses while highlighting the words most closely related to this observation.
In that day the branch of the LORD shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors of Israel. And he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning.
Isaiah 4:2–4 (ESV)
Suffice it to say that the horticulturally resonant branch and fruit cling enigmatically to the survivors of Israel and he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem. The fact that both branch and fruit are beautiful, glorious, pride, and honor with respect to the surviving remnant engenders messianic interpretation of this declaration, since it seems to hint at two entities in what we might call Jerusalem-after-the-storm rather than just one. Incidentally, the Hebrew behind the static and twice-stated ’shall be’ (2x) is in my judgment better rendered ‘shall become’. This rendering honors both the Hebrew syntax (…יהיה ל) and the core contextual idea of movement from a sorry state to its opposite.
The verses excerpted here place this beautification and glorification in a future moment when the eventual remainder of Judah’s people shall have passed through and survived some purifying calamity. The sequence is already apparent in the verses quoted just above. The nature of this fruitful disaster becomes even clearer in the verses that follow.
…once the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning.
YHWH’s flame then becomes a divine shield over Zion in the chapter’s remaining verses, a transformation narrated in prose that is deeply resonant of YHWH’s earlier redemptive engagement with Israel.
Then the LORD will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory there will be a canopy. There will be a booth for shade by day from the heat, and for a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain.
Isaiah 4:5–6 (ESV)
What are we to make of these glorious survivors, painted with an allusive brush in this early chapter of a massive book that has merely begun by the time we encounter the impressionistic canvas from which they stare out at us?
For a start, it bears underscoring that nothing portrayed in this cameo rubs roughly against the book’s longer and greater trajectory. Rather, the story of purification through a disaster designed and delivered by Jerusalem’s impassioned Divine Protector is part and parcel of the Isaianic package. Everything we discover here is constant with that greater story. If the tale is told briefly here, it will be developed, promised, declared, and pressed home time after time before this scroll can be rolled up and put away.
So, too, the notion that those who submit to the storm and survive its lashing will emerge as beautiful, honored, and holy. These splendid qualities, which cling naturally in the text to YHWH himself and to all that he restores, are here promised to those who endure the storm in the most intimate dialect that this book knows how to speak: that of re-naming.
And he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem…
Isaiah 4:3 (ESV)
The language of ‘prophetic promises’ is spoken too often and too glibly in connection with the company of the biblical prophets.
Yet without it we would stand baffled before a text like Isaiah’s fourth chapter, unable to speak.
The book called Isaiah is moored by three three weighty anchors: the Representative Summary that is chapter 1; the Generative Vision of chapter 6; and the Vision of Visions in the first five verses of chapter 2.
The Representative Summary prepares the intrepid reader of this immense work for what he or she is about to encounter. The Generative Vision is the sine qua non of the book as we have it. I find it impossible to imagine the book called Isaiah without this generative and entirely unexpected confrontation of our eventual prophet by the exalted King, high and lifted up. He thinks he will not survive the moment, yet survive he does, with a vision in his soul that he cannot shake loose.
This leaves us with the Vision of Visions in chapter 2. Read slowly, it unveils a breathtaking glimpse of a world turned on its head, an inversion of all that we assume to be true and real. Power dynamics that present themselves as unmalleable, as the very unmovable architecture of Reality, are deconstructed before our eyes. This vision depicts an impossible world, where rivers—floods of humanity, no less!—flow uphill against the always-there force of gravity to the highest place on earth, and for reasons no son or daughter of Israel could imagine finding on unwashed pagan lips.
All of this comprises or at the very least initiates the curiously introduced‘word that Isaiah saw’. If we concede to דבר its most common meaning—a spoken and heard word—then the prophet’s Vision of Visions has already dismantled the way of things even before the text has moved from introducing that vision to narrating it. One doesn’t see a word. Yet here we are.
This will be no ordinary world, this YHWH-vision, this prophet’s imagination, this new and inviting place.
What moment does the prophet have in mind?
The answer has been much tortured by biblical translation, vulnerable as the practice is to importing anachronisms into its text. So we find, particularly in the handiwork of evangelical translators with their sometimes careless assumption of Christian eschatological systems, translations that sound like technical references. For example, in the latter days. The words work, all right, but millions of readers will immediately insert the vision into a preconfigured assumption about where history goes when God takes the wheel.
It does not belong there. The words work well enough, but the connotations are too concrete. And, therefore, misleading.
Rather, the prophet is looking beyond circumstances as we know them to an undefined future. The Hebrew expression והיה באחרית הימים, if we allow ourselves a momento of clumsy literalism, can be rendered…
Now it shall happen in the after-part of our days that…
He is simply looking ahead, this newly envisioned prophet, to a future that he himself does not claim to know.
‘Eventually’ is too loose. ‘One fine day…’ is too casual. The Jewish Publication Society’s translation may do as well as we can:
In the days to come…
The prophet does not appear to know how long his bruised people will have to endure this present darkness. Things as we know them to be. This conventional, this hopeless, this dismal time.
But he imagines that things shall not always be this way.
One day a little hill shall become the cosmos’ highest mountain, the kind of mountains where gods move amidst the clouds, the kind of place where YHWH lives. Then, strangely, nations with new-lit appetite for instruction and for peace will find a welcome there. Everything will be different.
For the moment, this is how far prophetic hope knows to reach.
Hearers and readers are invited to anchor their lives, too, in a different place and a different time in order to live well and promisingly here. Now.
By the time the book called Isaiah crescendoes to the culminating dizziness of its final chapter, the prophetic voice has trafficked on the image of Daughter Zion with no reluctance to speak of her beauty and dazzlingly unlikely ornamentation.
Not for this prophet the reticence to shape words that admire the feminine body and a woman’s beauty. These were different days, a different aesthetic. The rules were not our rules.
Now, as the end of the massive work draws near, the author turns yet again to feminine metaphor. This time, the point is YHWH’s unstoppable determination to redeem Jerusalem, indeed to convert her or to restore her to her rightful place at the cosmos’ center. The very envy of nations.
To the biblical eye, redemption is always unexpected. Quite often, its component moments are sudden. So here:
Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? Shall a nation be brought forth in one moment? For as soon as Zion was in labor she brought forth her children.
“Shall I bring to the point of birth and not cause to bring forth?” says the LORD; “shall I, who cause to bring forth, shut the womb?” says your God.
Now Zion—so often the surprised or bemused or astonished female personification of YHWH’s unlikely chosen—is pregnant. Indeed, she is in labor.
Yet it is an unusual labor, one that lasts but a moment. Contractions have only begun when suddenly her children—not one, but many—race through throbbing womb to join us here in the light. In this light.
This doesn’t happen under normal conditions. No one has ever heard of such a thing. Yet in this moment, it is YHWH’s purpose and so it shall be.
Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? Shall a nation be brought forth in one moment? For as soon as Zion was in labor she brought forth her children.
The mere description of accelerated and preternaturally productive labor is then framed in YHWH’s own interpretation of events.
“Shall I bring to the point of birth and not cause to bring forth?” says the LORD; “shall I, who cause to bring forth, shut the womb?” says your God.
Perhaps the metaphor hints at YHWH as Divine Father of Israel, a people’s Divine Progenitor. Or perhaps YHWH stands in here as Midwife. The imagery is patient of polyvalence, its reference perhaps singular, perhaps multiple, always suggestively open to reflection beyond initial impressions.
In any case, YHWH is determined to redeem Mother Zion, to multiply her children, to populate her future with daughters and sons. His live-giving, community-engendering purpose shall not be stopped in its tracks any more than a woman well entered into labor shall be told ‘No go!’.
Redemption, here, is inevitable.
Yet one wonders whether the metaphor of a woman’s heaving labor invites its reader to consider another inevitability about the process: its pain.
Zion has throughout sixty-five of sixty-six chapters of the book never been far from trouble. Indeed, she has been bloodied by trouble. Made bereft by trouble. Cast out and rejected, by trouble.
Perhaps YHWH’s unstoppable thirst for redemption, the very inevitability of it all, must be seen as leading his daughters and sons to the glory of it through pain that loudly cries redemption’s impossibility.
Yet for this prophet, the giddy, redeemed cacophony of the people’s final glory only appears to be impossibly, a damned mirage, the haunting practiced upon the hopeless by a thousand zombied dreams.
In fact, suggests the Isaianic voice, it was always going to be this way. This joyful, abundant, glorious way. Inevitable.
“Shall I bring to the point of birth and not cause to bring forth?” says the LORD
The opening lines of the book called Isaiah’s sixtieth chapter perfectly capture redemption’s cadence.
Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you.
And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.
Isaiah 60:1–3 (ESV)’
If this is so, a subtle interchange between two closely related words drives the point home. Because cognate vocabulary maps differently from one language to another, this is easy to miss when reading in translation. The Hebrew words behind shine (אורי) and light (אורך) are in fact the same word, deployed first as verb and then as noun. The less obvious link between English ‘shine’ and ‘light’ is an unfortunate and inevitable loss in translation.
The reason this subtlety deserves a moment’s consideration is that the Isaianic voice persistently calls desolate Judah (‘Zion’ in its most common personification) to action. Yet the summons is never the call to an initiating action. It is always a response to what YHWH has just done or is about to do.
Arise! … Shine! … because your light has come!
We are talking not so much about cause and effect. The dynamic is rather best expressed as cause and response. The solicited response would never make sense, indeed would be impossible and perhaps unthinkable if YHWH had not acted first. But since he has done so, the summons is now a response to YHWH’s renewed mercies to Zion.
This cause-and-response dynamic splays out across this magnificent chapter, with its glory, its beauty, and its wealth of kings and nations streaming into Zion. Quite literally, Zion’s glory and its beauty are derived from YHWH’s glory and from YHWH’s beautifying intentions. Yet both Zion and her now subservient kings and nations participate with YHWH in the transformation of a city that will once again become both holy and beloved.
Whether those nations do so willingly and as a facet of their own redemption is a debated matter. My inclination is that this is so. Yet the passage also hints at pockets of resistance that shall know no future.
Down to its final verse, the chapter knows no good thing that does not flow from divine initiation.
The least one shall become a clan, and the smallest one a mighty nation; I am the LORD; in its time I will hasten it.
Isaiah 60:22 (ESV)
Yet not for a moment is the role of Zion’s sons and daughters, to say nothing of the children of the nations now caught up in YHWH’s project, anything less than exalted labor.
These lines are scribbled by a father, indeed a grandfather. My sixty-odd years somehow crystallize in the lives of my kin.
I would do anything for them. As years of harvest and locust have come and gone, my family, my kin, my flesh and bone have become a kind of existential bottom line.
In this, as in so many other things in this small life that has been mine to live, I am not unusual. What privileges we steward are most intensely known in family. Not in all families, but in many. We become within their embrace a kind of absolute, a non-negotiable. They become so to us.
Take everything else. Don’t touch my children.
The prophet plays a redemptive melody in the key of this family truth.
Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD say, ‘The LORD will surely separate me from his people’; and let not the eunuch say, ‘Behold, I am a dry tree.’
For thus says the LORD: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’
Isaiah 56:3–5 (ESV)
In the prophetic imagination here spun into a temple story—the most sacred kind of story YHWH’s seer knows to tell—Jacob’s enigmatic deity speaks of his house and of his family and his family legacy. The divine Paterfamilias—half-hidden, half-known—makes vows in the dialect of what is most precious to him, that which is more his own than anything else.
The irony that pulsates through this speech is that YHWH speaks of those who by lineage and history are not his. Those who do not belong in any conventional sense the notion of kinship might conjure.
Curiously and potently, he makes promise that thrust his historical sons and daughters into second class.
YHWH’s declaration is absurd unless it is true. If it is true, it turns all that we thought we knew on its head.
For thus says the LORD: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.‘
Isaiah 56.5
The generous teachings of Jesus will, centuries hence, pivot on this same upsetting truth. Salvation is of the Jews but for the whole wide world.
As those surprised by the invitation find their way to YHWH’s sacred house, the prophet dares to suggest, they will find themselves his favorites. The most privileged. The most richly endowed with unforgettable glories that shall endure for centuries, for millennia, until ‘never’ and ‘forever’ become exhausted of meaning at redemption’s glad destination.
Better, these castrated, pagan foreigners hear spoken of their fate from the spokesmen of this incomprehensible God of Jacob with his strange, ominous, promising name.
The reversal of Zion’s fortunes is a theme so intensely passionate in the book called Isaiah that the prophet ransacks the full range of metaphor to make his case. Zion, the personification of a city that incarnates both the city’s deported-and-now-returned citizens and its own restored metropolitan glories, is about to learn that her God reigns.
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’
The issue in play is not so much theology proper or divine ontology. YHWH’s announced reign is not here a theoretical experience but rather an intensively lived experience. Zion is about to taste the power of her God in the form of restoration from the cataclysm that has leveled her walls, emptied her of her people, and snatched away her future. ‘Your God reigns’ must refer to the evidence that YHWH is not inert, but rather decisively present and active in the imminent turning of tables to Zion’s benefit.
The book’s fifty-second chapter presents the striking metaphor of the watchmen on the city’s walls breaking into song—or at the very least into noisy and joyous exclamation—as they leverage their privileged altitude to see the return of YHWH to Zion before their less elevated neighbors are so fortunate.
The voice of your watchmen—they lift up their voice; together they sing for joy; for eye to eye they see the return of the LORD to Zion.
Break forth together into singing, you waste places of Jerusalem, for the LORD has comforted his people; he has redeemed Jerusalem.
It is impossible to know whether the author intends actually singing. There is the lifting up of their collective voice, the double deployment of verb that can represent song but might also be a less melodic shout for joy (רנן), and a breaking forth into whatever that exuberant sound actually is. The Septuagint, in a show of translational modesty, underscores the joyousness of the sound and leaves its substance to the imagination. Translations ever since opt in roughly equal measure either for song or for joyful shouting.
Regardless, we have a somewhat odd image that nearly refuses to sound strange precisely because it is part of a metaphorical narrative where larger impossibilities are taking place within the ordinary space and time. We almost fail to register the entertaining spectacle of night watchmen giddy with shouted delight or bursting into manly song from atop their walled perches.
The smaller strangeness of the image fades before the brilliant impossibility of YHWH striding across Judah’s desolate terrain towards Zion with his rescued captives following just behind.
If YHWH has done all this, why strain at a cadre of watchmen who can’t stop laughing–or singing—as they take it all in?
It is tempting to see here a narrative playing-out of the new song that becomes the people’s boisterous response to YHWH’s improbable redemption in Isaiah and in several psalms.
Soon the whole city will be loud with grateful sound, redemptive surprise powering its decibels, raised above normal volume as watchmen stand atop high walls.
A reflection offered to United World Mission’s US Leadership Team
27 September 2021
I think we may find ourselves in a season of Joshua-like courage.
I’m no doubt influenced in saying so by John’s kick-off video last week, but also by a long weekend walk in the autumnal Connecticut woods with my dog Rhea and three recent conversations with—respectively—Jonathan, Jessica, and Chad. Those convos were of such quality that they left me feeling as though we’re in the kind of season that becomes a point of reference for entire careers. The kinds of seasons that have retired LAMers at Penney Farms still talking about the 60s and 70s when young renegades like René Padilla, Samuel Escobar, and Orlando Costas burst on the scene without asking permission. LAM, to the astonishment of many and the horror of some, cautiously embraced these Latin American voices.
The rest is history.
I’m sure we could narrate similar tales come from critical hinges in 20th and 21st century history, for example, when it became possible to serve behind the Iron Curtain as the Berlin Wall trembled and eventually crumbled.
In each case, Joshua-like courage was required … and forthcoming.
I think we might be in another of those seasons. We may someday talk about the moment we’re living now in the UWM retirement community that John will build for us. Some sooner than others.
Here’s a text:
Josh. 1:1 After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, 2 “Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the people of Israel. 3 Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses. 4 From the wilderness and this Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites to the Great Sea toward the going down of the sun shall be your territory. 5 No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Just as I was with Moses, so will be with you. I will not leave you or forsake you. 6 Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them. 7 Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good successwherever you go. 8 This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. 9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”
Joshua 1.1-9 (ESV)
Can you see in this opening to the first book after the ‘five book of Moses’ how utterly grounded—the more appropriate term is rooted—Joshua is called to remain?
7 Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good successwherever you go. 8 This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
Joshua 1.7-8 (ESV)
And yet Joshua’s commission is anything but backward-looking. To the contrary, he is charged with stepping into very large shoes and with leading his people into the scary unknown. Not all of them wanted to go there. Not all of them wanted to go there under Joshua’s baton.
This happens in the midst of lots of drama, with Yahweh responding in Deuteronomy to Moses’ plea to be allowed to enter the promised land after he’d been told that was not gonna’ happen:
Deut. 3:23 And I pleaded with the LORD at that time, saying, 24 ‘O Lord GOD, you have only begun to show your servant your greatness and your mighty hand. For what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do such works and mighty acts as yours? 25 Please let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan, that good hill country and Lebanon.’ 26 But the LORD was angry with me because of you and would not listen to me. And the LORD said to me, ‘Enough from you; do not speak to me of this matter again.’
Deuteronomy 3.23-26 (ESV)
Deeply rooted …. forward-leaning.
I wonder if that’s where we find ourselves as UWM and as a USLT…
I might be tempted to leave Joshua and Joshua-like courage where it stands, not uprooting it from its native soil and forcing into some kind of relevance for us when that might not be what it’s there for.
Except for Psalm 1, one of my favorites.
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
in all that he does, he prospers.
Psalm 1.1-3 (ESV)
One of Israel’s poets has riffed on Joshua 1 and, in the process, democratized it. The way he redeploys the language of what for us is Joshua 1 make it indisputably a poetic restatement of the Joshua text. Then a final editor of this book of Israel’s praises—maybe the same persona, maybe not—has placed it as the very doorway into Israel’s hymns, laments, meditations, screams, and words of stabilizing wisdom.
So Joshua-like courage now becomes a summons for every daughter and son of Israel.
Again, we see that his blessed person is very, very deeply rooted. Now to say ‘grounded’ is not enough.
Yet this Psalm is no more antiquarian than the Joshua text, no more backward-looking that Joshua’s commission was. It is about wading forward into the psalms, wading forward into life with Yahweh, wading in as a responsible member of the community in which Yahweh has embedded each of us, wading in to forge a future out of sometimes unpromising raw material.
Joshua-like courage, now for everyone. Still deeply rooted …. and still forward-leaning.
It’s this line of thinking that has got its claws into me in this season of life within UWM (and FUSBC…) that has me seeking Joshua-like courage, which is no more innate in me than it was in Joshua. He, after all, needed strong exhortation to summon up this courage rather than simply employ a kind of heroic fearlessness that lay somehow on the surface of him, readily available.
That’s what I want to do and what I observe numbers of you doing.
I want to reminisce about this season someday on my rocking chair at Bernard Farms in central Vermont, when Autumn is falling and the voices of my LAM forebears in Penney Farms have gone quiet. It’ll be worth it.
A brief reflection offered to UWM’s Leadership Team
10 May 2021
John asked me to share something from the Old Testament’s ‘Wisdom Literature’. This happened last Thursday after I shared with him some anecdotes about teaching my ‘Escritos’ (roughly: ‘Old Testament sacred writings’) course at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia. I’m aware that these words will not be ‘inspirational’ in any conventional sense.
So allow me some non-conventionally-inspirational ruminations upon…
When God’s purpose is not to reveal doctrine in splendid clarity but rather to invite his people into a hard conversation.
What it’s like to teach at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia (and other places like it).
Why I loathe the expression ‘training leaders’ (and why most TEI missional scholars would lean away from ‘indoctrination’ and towards ‘constructive theology’…).
One very daring part of the Old Testament’s wisdom literature is the book called Ecclesiastes. This work’s principal speaker is named ‘Qohelet’ according to the Hebrew presentation, so I’ll use that name as a point of reference over the next minutes.
Qohelet starts, ends, and punctuates everything in between with the cry that ‘Everything is vanity!’ (הבל = a breath, momentary, absurd, incomprehensible, a bare illusion)
Along the way, Qohelet makes stupendous claims that are extremely difficult to partner with ‘biblical orthodoxy’.
Nothing has meaning.
Nothing produces any result/benefit/profit.
We’re no better than the animals.
Nothing ever makes a difference.
God loads us down with meaninglessness in order to weary or even to torment us.
And there’s no way out of this endless Doom Loop.
Then, just to keep us off balance, Qohelet pairs these ‘unorthodox’ declarations, which are spoken with brassy self-assurance, with other statements that are more comfortable for believing readers:
’So here’s what you do: Enjoy the food, sex, and shelter God has given you. They’re his gifts.’
‘Do your best to keep God’s commandments.’
Yet in spite of this whiplash-producing juxtaposition of declarations, never has Judaism or the Christian Church given serious, sustained consideration to the possibility that Ecclesiastes might be anything other than Holy Scripture. What are we to do with that?
Here’s where my students are right now:
They’re working painstakingly through chapter 6 via a methodology we call ‘Theological Conversation’. Each student does a deep dive into one of the chapter’s verses and presents his or her conclusions. Another student is assigned the responsibility of first response. After that initial exchange, it’s no holds barred on conversation that ensues.
“There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous evil. If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life’s good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. For it comes in vanity and goes in darkness, and in darkness its name is covered. Moreover, it has not seen the sun or known anything, yet it finds rest rather than he. Even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good—do not all go to the one place?
All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied. For what advantage has the wise man over the fool? And what does the poor man have who knows how to conduct himself before the living? Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite: this also is vanity and a striving after wind.
Whatever has come to be has already been named, and it is known what man is, and that he is not able to dispute with one stronger than he. The more words, the more vanity, and what is the advantage to man? For who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow? For who can tell man what will be after him under the sun?”
Ecclesiastes 6:1-12 (ESV)
Yet these aren’t necessarily Qohelet’s wildest statements. There are others, like these:
2.7 So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind.
3.19-20 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.
And at the same time we’re trying to do justice to an assessment that shows up in the book’s epilogue, a kind of final summary … a tying up of loose ends.
It commends Qohelet for his expertise in shaping Israelites in the ways of wisdom. Then it adds this summary:
“Qohelet sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth.
The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd.”
Ecclesiastes 12:10-11 (ESV, lightly emended and emphasis added)
So why does an old dude like me continue to invest the countless hours of preparation that are required in order to lead students through arguably depressing and unorthodox literature like Qohelet?
Some days, I’m not sure….
On other, brighter and clearer mornings—and I’m happy to report that these are the more frequent ones—this is what I think I see:
I do it for the sheer, inexhaustible, compelling beauty of the biblical text. It feeds me. It’s an intellectual task and and an existential compulsion that I can’t find a way to walk away from. Maybe this what the editor of Ecclesiastes has in mind when he says that Qohelet spoke ‘words of delight’ and ‘words of truth’
I do it because I don’t believe Colombia’s emerging Christian leaders basically need a list of things they need to believe. Or, even if they do need that, they can get it from someone who’s not me. I’m not interested in ‘training’ them in any narrow sense. I’m interested in sharing life and study with them to see whether there’s any way I can shape them as human beings whom I’d like to share a beer with. And whom I would trust at my wife’s bedside after a cancer diagnosis.
I do it because I believe that both Yahweh and the canonical Scriptures are bold and confident enough to set the table for a believing people’s ongoing conversation, knowing that they will be led into all truth as they refuse to over-simplify the most important things and as they process life honestly as it comes. This feels authentic to me, true to both the nature of Scripture and to life as I experience it. Scripture seems not to insist that redemptive conversations be easy conversations nor overly pious ones, nor conversations where the outcome is known from before things heat up.
I do it because I think one of the things theological education must be is frighteningly unpragmatic. I can’t tell you how or and I cannot quantify in what measure Andrés … or María … or Paolo … or Diego … or Tatiana … have been changed by immersion in Ecclesiastes. But I know them. I share life and community with them. I look them in the eye. And I know in by bones that they are better … richer … more human persons and servants of Jesus for having walked this way. So I’m gonna keep doing what I do until God makes me stop.
I think that, for most (not all) of our UWM colleagues who are TEI missional scholars, we could change the ‘I’ to ‘we’. And I suspect we could do the same to include many of you.
‘Vanity of vanities!’, says Qohelet. ‘All is vanity!’
It is foolishness to find our moment too easily in Scripture, as though the great matters that weighed upon prophets’ hearts melt away to reveal only the towering mountain that is us. It is another kind of folly to ignore patterns of divine and human conduct that might instruct us, nudge us from our ignorance onto a slight rise from which one can see more clearly.
In an era different from our own, an exasperated YHWH released his people to their own devices. One effect was that capable people withdrew from the pains of leadership. Only children stepped up.
For behold, the Lord GOD of hosts is taking away from Jerusalem and from Judah support and supply, all support of bread, and all support of water; the mighty man and the soldier, the judge and the prophet, the diviner and the elder, the captain of fifty and the man of rank, the counselor and the skillful magician and the expert in charms. And I will make boys their princes, and infants shall rule over them. And the people will oppress one another, every one his fellow and every one his neighbor; the youth will be insolent to the elder, and the despised to the honorable.
For a man will take hold of his brother in the house of his father, saying: ‘You have a cloak; you shall be our leader, and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule’; in that day he will speak out, saying: ‘I will not be a healer; in my house there is neither bread nor cloak; you shall not make me leader of the people.
For Jerusalem has stumbled, and Judah has fallen, because their speech and their deeds are against the LORD, defying his glorious presence.
Isaiah 3:1-8 ESV
If we are too often led by children in the grown-up bodies of women and men—and we are—then we ought to ask about causes. Where are the adults? Where are the discerning, the skilled? Where are the clear-eyed, the truth-stewarding, the level heads who know whispered conspiracy from fact and how to call a spade a spade? Where are those with the cojones properly to despise a fool in the good old way because fools spit on things that have taken generations to nourish?
They are on their couches.
Leadership is hard and largely uncompensated. One leads for others, largely at the cost of oneself. This is simply how things are. There’s no crying in leadership.
When a community or a nation is no longer inspired by large ambitions, those who should lead do not. We abdicate.
Children take over. We elect them, we anoint them, we hand precious things over to them.
We ought perhaps to ask whether YHWH’s hand—now, as then—has turned against us, allowed us our ease, subjected us to infants and imbeciles.
Then we ought to repair the great breach that has opened up, or at least summon the courage to make a beginning.
Canter Bridge 