CHRISTIANS
HEARING ISAIAH
Ellen F. Davis
Professor of Bible and Practical Theology
Duke Divinity School
A prefatory word on how
I address the question of preaching Isaiah in my teaching: from
time to time I teach a semester-long course on preaching Isaiah.
In the first week, everyone does a broad exegetical overview of
the whole book, looking for themes that may run throughout. Then
we go through particular chapters, spending about half the time
in eighth-century Isaiah, and about half in exilic Isaiah. Along
with the weekly exegetical work, we look at sermons: some from classical
preachers (e.g., Calvin, Lancelot Andrewes), some from our contemporaries.
Almost all of these preachers are Christians.
"...what
might make Isaiah initially compelling for preachers in 21st-century
North America is the possibility of discerning a symmetry between
our situation and that of the eighth-century prophet."
It may be that the greatest
claim that Isaiah lays upon preachers follows from the fact that
no other biblical book offers such fresh and compelling images of
God: God "high and lifted up" (6:1) as Sovereign and Judge
over our sin-wracked world; God as Immanu-El, a sure and felt Presence
with us; God struggling like a woman in labor (42:14) to bring forth
new life in situations that seem, to ordinary eyes, entirely hopeless.
The enduring freshness of Isaiah is in part the effect of unbelievably
great poetry. As Bishop Lowth saw 250 years ago, within the corpus
of biblical poetry, Isaiah represents the acme of the "sublime."
However, what might make Isaiah initially compelling for preachers
in 21st-century North America is the possibility of discerning a
symmetry between our situation and that of the eighth-century prophet.
Isaiah of Jerusalem is charged to preach and prophesy to a people
who live, as he sees, in a bubble: a bubble of opulence in the midst
of aching poverty, a bubble that has grown to near-bursting point
through precarious international alliances, power-brokering, war-making.
All this is directly contrary to the divine demand that Isaiah articulates,
the demand that the king of Judah make the difficult choice to trust
in God, rather than in his army-and 2,800 years later, all this
sounds uncomfortably fresh.
The question, then, is
not whether Isaiah will preach. It is whether preachers have the
courage to speak the message that emerges when the book is read
as a whole-that is, when one gives due attention to First Isaiah,
for that part of the book is distinctly under-represented in every
Christian lectionary I know, and by Christian preachers altogether.
The bulk of the sermons I have found, from the 16th century to the
present, draw their texts mostly from the salvation oracles of exilic
Isaiah, or from the eschatological passages of Chs. 9 and 11-although
those passages hardly make sense apart from the hard message of
First Isaiah. A further question: if preachers take on the whole
message, can anyone bear to listen?
It is evident that for
the sake of preachers, I welcome the recent development in Isaiah
scholarship (beginning perhaps with Brevard Childs' work in the
1970s) that sees an essential connection between the two major parts
of the book: Isaiah of Jerusalem and Exilic Isaiah. (In the latter
designation, I am lumping together so-called Second and Third Isaiahs;
Benjamin Sommer has convinced me by his argument that they derive
from the same hand.) Conversely, the problems I see in preaching
Isaiah arise when we neglect that interrelatedness. With few exceptions,
both Christian lectionaries and preachers represent Isaiah as an
upbeat prophet, an encourager. One telling instance of this is the
common practice in my denomination (Episcopal) of reading Isaiah
6 at a priest's ordination-but reading only up to verse 8: "Here
am I; send me!" The grim message to be proclaimed to a blind,
deaf, and fat-hearted people is omitted. This may make the ordination
itself more cheerful, but I am not sure it helps the new priest
make sense of a vocation will surely prove over the long term to
be extraordinarily difficult.
Putting it in a slightly
different way, we Christians know Isaiah less as a prophet of judgment
and justice (the two sides of mishpat, a central concept in this
book) than as the bearer of a messianic and evangelical message
that we take to have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ-and thus to
be largely fulfilled already in the life of the church. Yet it seems
to me that such a one-sided emphasis on fulfillment is not supported
by closer attention to the book, for one of its pronounced features
is a contrast between the "present-tense" situation the
prophet addresses and a "future-tense" vision of hope.
It is noteworthy that all the evangelical passages are oriented
to the future, and some have a decidedly eschatological cast: "And
it shall be, at the end of days..." (2:2). Moreover, the literary
shaping of the book prevents us from seeing a clear progression
from judgment to hope for those whom the prophet addresses. Judgment
oracles are prominent not only in First Isaiah but also in so-called
Third Isaiah, where they are intermingled with some of the passages
that Christians are most inclined to read christologically, and
this should prevent us Christians from imagining that the prophetic
message traces a clear historical progression-as though the "end
of days" had fully arrived, following a now-completed judgment
on Judah and Jerusalem, executed successively by the Babylonians
and the Romans. On the contrary, throughout the book, there is an
acute and abiding tension between the present-tense situation to
which Isaiah witnesses and the future-tense vision captured in eschatological
images.
A good example of the tension
that persists to the end is found in a striking passage in the penultimate
chapter of the book, where repeated contrast is drawn between "my
servants" and "you (plural) who forsake YHWH":
Look, my servants shall eat,
but you, you shall go hungry....
Look, my servants shall be joyous,
but you, you will be ashamed. (65:13)
The prophet goes on to urge his hearers to claim a radically different
future: "By contrast (kî 'im), [you] be glad and rejoice
forever" (65:18), in the new heavens and new earth which God
is creating. Yet any sensitive hearer must recognize that, although
we have survived up to this point and are privileged to hear the
message of salvation, bare survival and hearing do not in themselves
guarantee our inclusion in the category of "my servants,"
blessed participants in the new reality. Nowhere in the book of
Isaiah is the remnant preserved to date clearly identified as a
righteous remnant" that has survived by virtue of its righteousness.
Rather, first and last, "Isaiah" is struggling with a
people that has been severely chastened, more than decimated, and
still does not turn to God.
I would lay it down, then,
as a general principle that any reading that dissolves the tension
between Isaiah's present-tense and future-tense messages is invalid.
To my knowledge, the best and most concise means of giving liturgical
expression to this tension between past and present, on the one
hand, and future, on the other, is found in the traditional liturgical
practice of the synagogue. The final chapter of Isaiah is read,
with its hair-curling final verse that points to the present-tense
situation of rebellion:
And they shall go out and look
upon the corpses of the people who sin against me.
For their worm does not die,
and their fire is not quenched,
and they are an abhorrence to all flesh. (66:24)
Following that, the encouraging penultimate verse is repeated, and
thus the reading concludes:
And it shall be, new moon by new moon,
and Sabbath by Sabbath,
that all flesh will come
to worship before me, says YHWH.
Although the canonically final word of judgment must be heard, nonetheless
the last word spoken in the context of prayer reaffirms God's positive,
creative intention for "all flesh."
By contrast, the bias against
judgment in my own lectionary makes it unlikely that we will hear
and apply to ourselves Isaiah's present-tense address to rebellious
Israel. One must regard with deep suspicion such an artificial "deliverance"
for the church. It is true that the New Testament writers apply
to the synagogue over against the early church Isaiah's judgments
of blindness, deafness, incomprehension (e.g., Isa.6:10 cited in
Matt.13:13-15 and John 12:40, Isa.29:9-10 cited in Rom.11:8-10).
Yet to accept that discriminating judgment as a permanent historical
fact would seem to bespeak exactly the "fat-heartedness"
that Isaiah exposes in his contemporaries (Isa.6:10). Ephraim Radner
suggests that the contrast between synagogue and church as drawn
by Paul and the evangelists is "figurally prophetic of Christian
Israel too, just because of its participation in the larger christic
form" that allows the church to participate in God's revelation
and promises to Israel. So also in Christ, the church stands-with
Israel and even as Israel-under the abiding judgment of God.
I will admit that in my
tradition sermons devoted to Isaiah passages are altogether rare,
but there is another way in which many of us cite Isaiah's words-out
of canonical context and probably mostly unconsciously-specifically
in the Eucharistic Sanctus ("Holy, holy, holy") and the
Christmas proclamation, "Immanuel." In each case, I think
a good-faith use of Isaiah's words demand awareness of the tension
between present tense and future tense. Consider: as the introduction
to the Eucharistic Prayer, the Sanctus is pressing for full reconciliation
between the Holy God and sinful humanity. That reconciliation begins
now, wherever the sinful church gathers to eat and drink. But it
is a fairly safe bet that we will still be sinful when we finish,
and "the whole earth" will not be perceptibly "full
of [God's] glory." So if the Eucharist is not a sham, or a
failure, then the full reconciliation to which it points must be
an eschatological reality. At the same time, if we are offering
any meaningful sacrifice of ourselves, then reconciliation must
also be a present reality, and it must cost us something.
What
does it mean, in concrete terms, to embrace Isaiah's vision of
absolute reliance on God? For instance, is it possible to sing
the Sanctus in good faith in a society in which the economic gap
between poor and rich grows steadily?
If the congregation is
to sing the Sanctus in good faith, week by week or day by day, then
something like Isaiah's view of holiness must be set forth regularly
in teaching and preaching. And surely that means asking some hard
questions of ourselves. What does it mean, in concrete terms, to
embrace Isaiah's vision of absolute reliance on God? For instance,
is it possible to sing the Sanctus in good faith in a society in
which the economic gap between poor and rich grows steadily? "YHWH
of Hosts is exalted through mishpat (judgment and justice both),
and the Holy God is sanctified through righteousness" (5:16).
Are we sure we can sing it in a fully armed society? If we are tempted
to answer "yes," then the question of the later Isaiah
accuses us:
Whom did you dread and fear,
so that you were false,
and me you did not remember
or take to your heart? (57:11)
Similar considerations
apply in determining what constitutes a good-faith proclamation
that Immanu-El, "God is with us" (Isa.7:14). Here it is
important to ask, what is the significance of that name within the
context of Isaiah? The best contextual clue to meaning lies, not
in the elusive historical identity of the pregnant 'almah of Ch.7,
but rather in the two repetitions of the phrase Immanu-El in Ch.8,
first as a name for Judah (8:8), and then as a challenge addressed
to foreign invaders (8:10). In both cases it signifies protection
for those who take the risk of trust in YHWH. But it is a risk-or
at least, a discrimen, a test that separates the sheep from the
goats. This three-fold repetition of the Immanu-El assurance is
followed just a few verses later by a passage (8:13-15) that names
God as "fear" and "dread" for Israel and Jerusalem
as well as for their enemies. Indeed, Immanu-El captures in a single
phrase what Isaiah identifies as the central paradox of Israel's
existence: "For great in the midst of you is the Holy One of
Israel" (12:6). Everything depends on that Presence, yet those
are hardly "comfortable words," even if in my own liturgical
tradition, we may sing them brightly enough in the Morning Prayer
service. Could-should-any people ever be comfortable with the God
who is highly exalted in judgment and justice; wholly at ease with
death-dealing and ultimately death-destroying (25:8, Eng.25:7) Holiness
smack in its midst? Is it any wonder that (as the passage goes on
to say) "many among them shall stumble and fall and be broken
and ensnared and caught" (8:15)?
If we have read Isaiah
well, then it becomes more difficult for the church to make its
accustomed proclamation-indeed, our seasonal greeting-Immanu-El.
Any sentimental or self-assured assertion of God's presence becomes
impossible. For, as Isaiah insists, God's decision to be in our
midst forces us to choose between apostasy and absolute trust in
that Presence, trust that entails rejection of all penultimate sources
of security. There is no middle ground. Bearing in mind Radner's
notion that New Testament judgments against Jewish Israel "are
figurally prophetic of Christian Israel too," we may recall
that in the Gospel of John, it is precisely the visible presence
of God in Christ that confirms the guilt of "Israel."
"Indeed, if it was impossible for them to believe, the reason
is to be found in words spoken by Isaiah...: 'He has blinded their
eyes and dulled their minds....' Isaiah said these things because
he had a vision of Jesus in his state of glory, and it was of him
that he spoke" (John 12:39-40). When we Christians use Immanu-El
as a seasonal greeting that costs us nothing, then we bring upon
ourselves the judgment of John's Gospel: "If you were blind,
there would be no guilt in you. But you claim that you can see,
and so your guilt remains" (John 9:41).
****
A longer version of this essay may be found in Preaching from
Psalms, Oracles, and Parables (Sermons That Work, volume XIV),
edited by Roger Alling and David J. Schlafer. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse
Publishing, February 2006.
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