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PERICOPE STUDY
CENTER FOR THEOLOGY, LRC
The
Second Sunday after the Epiphany
January
16, 2005
1.
“Listen to me, you islands; hear this, you distant nations: Before I
was born the LORD
called me; from my birth he has made mention of my name…..he who formed me in
the womb to be his servant…” The
deutero-Isaiah author announces the credentials of the servant-to-come to a
people in exile, a people driven and dragged into Babylon by a regime now
approaching its last legs. The
prophetic pedigree of the Servant is from the LORD Himself, Whose announcement is intended not only for the
direct beneficiaries—the sons and daughters of Jacob—but also for the
“islands and distant nations.” Specifically,
the Servant is the one in whom God “will display (His) splendor.”
God will make his “mouth like a sharpened sword” fashioning him into
“a polished arrow” for His purposes.
2.
Polished arrow and sharpened sword notwithstanding, the Servant will know
frustration if not futility: “I
have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.”
Frustration may well have informed the way of the prophet at this point.
Proclaiming “prepare ye the way of the LORD” to a captive people is an enterprise
that invites upon itself skepticism. Forty
years and more have passed since the walls of Jerusalem, outer walls and temple
walls, fell to Nebuchadnezzar. Forty years and more have witnessed the acculturation
recorded—and resisted—by Daniel and his friends. But Daniel and his friends were not among the majority.
Daniel, Azariah, Hananiah, and Mishael resisted, and prevailed in their
faithfulness, despite severe hardships of torture by fire and lions.
They remained faithful. But
many did not resist. Many forgot
the LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. Still more did not
particularly want to hear about a servant, a suffering servant, or worse, the
remnant as a suffering servant. The
promise of restoration is yet to be realized, the way home yet only a dream, or
an inviting possibility.
3. But Isaiah was not mired in frustration or futility. Rather, he proclaimed an even greater insight, one that can be imagined to have fallen on incredulous, even slightly hostile, ears: Says the LORD, regarding the Servant to come: “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth….Kings will see you and rise up, princes will see and bow down, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.” Not in the short run, or even in the life of the prophet himself, was this to be realized. Some got to go home…through the wilderness. Some participated in at least a partial restoration. But no “light for the Gentiles” or “salvation to the ends of the earth.” The prophet proclaimed not for himself, known though he was by the LORD, but one for the future who will “bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.”
4.
The remarkably prophetic dimension of this passage, for the first few
generations of Christians, was its prescience into the insight that Paul of
Tarsus related to the Ephesians, quoted in epistle lesson for the festival of
the Epiphany, insight into “the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to
men in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s
holy apostles and prophets. This
mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel,
members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ
Jesus.” So it goes for Paul, this
“mystery kept hidden in God, who created all things.” (Ephesians 3: 4b-6,
9b) That the intimated disclosure
of the mystery of the ages was already there in Isaiah, awaiting its fruition,
serves as powerful linkage of the insights of the old covenant to the revelation
of the new. Recognition
occasionally needed vision, as, in particular, St. Peter in Joppa and in
Caesarea to Cornelius: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show
favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is
right.” (Acts 10:34-35)
5.
Epiphany is the season of light, the shining of the Christ manifest to
the nations. We sing it in the
hymns: “brightest and best of the stars of the morning, dawn on our darkness
and lend us thine aid.” “As a
star, God’s holy Word leads us to our King and Lord; brightly from its sacred
pages shall this light throughout the ages shine upon our path of life, shine
upon our path of life.” Plato knew darkness as the environment of moral and
intellectual ignorance, light as the medium of knowledge and truth.
The ancients knew that evil flourishes in darkness, unseen and
unmonitored. The light of day
brings clarity even amid ambiguity, and exposes evil for its own shame.
Jesus Christ the Light of the world is the one Who is the way, the truth,
and the life; the life who is the light of men—who shines upon our path of
life.
* * * * * *
6.
But there is more here. “Listen,
you islands”…what for Isaiah was admonition to the people of those small
lands surrounded by water is now directed to post-modern “islands” of
autonomian man, those radically self-absorbed individuals who have severed
freedom from truth to fashion their own truth, even over against the teaching of
God in the scriptures. Listen.
Listen to the Servant. Before
I was born the LORD
called me, made mention of my name. Before
I was born. The LORD
knew me and called me by name before I was
born.
Talk
about prophetic!
The Old Testament pericope for Epiphany 2 in this series falls on the
Sunday before the 28th anniversary of Roe-v-Wade.
From the sixth century before Christ come words prophetic indeed across
time. The deutero-Isaiah author announces the Servant’s credentials to a
people in exile, a people driven and dragged into Babylon by a regime now on its
last legs. The prophetic pedigree
is from the LORD
himself, Whose knowledge is prenatal and Whose formation is, well, formative.
The Hebrew notion that a child becomes a person
only when he first breathes air is
challenged in this passage and in several others, notably by King David already
in the 10th century, in the 139th psalm, verses 13-16:
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are
wonderful, I know that full well. My
frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my
unformed body. All the days
ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
The
psalm for the day is not the 139th, because the pericope choices
follow ancient Mediterranean patterns of prayer, rather than taking their
prophetic cues from contemporary holocausts of conceit.
But David knows, as does Isaiah later, that what is growing in the womb
is a human being. They knew little
about fetal development and even less about full genetic complement.
But they knew that one is known by the LORD
even before one is “made in the secret place.” Sexuality and gestation,
powerful forces and phenomena representing to humanity the venue of regeneration
and the coming of the generations, both alike pale before the spiritual reality
of being made and known and named by the
LORD. Even before
one is conceived, one is known by the LORD.
7.
Listen, you islands! What
kind of man or woman dismisses as mere tissue what has been known by the LORD
in advance, carries full genetic complement, and is a human being at the
beginning of life? In a meeting
some time back of Lutherans for Life at Concordia Church, Conover, it was
recalled that there is an abortion every twenty seconds in the United States.
Every twenty seconds.
There
are atrocities in the world abounding. And
in the main they are called atrocities. But
this atrocity is called “morally neutral” by some, even, who name the name
of Jesus Christ. Morally
neutral….as in “a matter over which Christians in good conscience can
disagree.” I doubt it. Correction: actually,
I have no doubt about it … One simply cannot read the Isaiah passage as to the
Servant who is to be light to the nations and call the deliberate destruction of
life in the womb “morally neutral.”
“Listen
to me, you islands: Before I was born the LORD called me; from my birth he has made
mention of my name…..he who formed me in the womb to be his servant…”
Lord, have mercy upon us.
JLY
01.14.02
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