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PERICOPE STUDY
CENTER FOR THEOLOGY, LRC
THE
THIRD SUNDAY IN ADVENT
December 12, 2004
1. The scholars of biblical literature, like most of the rest of us, can get lost in the trees and not see the forest. Or, in this case, lost in the desert and not see the prescience. The passage from Isaiah 35 carries the heading in NRSV of “The Return of the Redeemed to Zion,” an allusion at least to their having been away! An allusion, indeed, to the time of the Exile, a sesquicentennial away from Isaiah of Jerusalem, five chapters away from the sophisticate-consensus beginning of Deutero-Isaiah at chapter 40. Chapter 35, it is said, is “misplaced” in the final redaction of the Isaiah material, belonging to the second period, the period that presupposes the Fall of Jerusalem, and thus after chapter 40. The material of the first 39 chapters is ascribed to Isaiah of Jerusalem, who prophesied from “the year that King Uzziah died” until just after the beginning of the 7th century BC. Finding “exile and return” poetry in the 8th century material has to be an anachronism, it is said, if not an anomaly.
2. I am not a Hebrew scholar and thus cannot make judgments about similarities of language or thought patterns. Thus also cannot make judgments about placement of material: it is indeed possible that later material could have been moved to the former section. But God’s prophets are not so bound to logic and reason as biblical scholars. They are men—and occasionally women—of vision and passion, whose eyes can see injustice in covenant pretense, idolatry in diversity, deserts blooming in the midst of despair. The prophets are spokesmen for God, Whose vision is eternal and cosmic, originative and eschatological—not bound by time and space. Let us concede the possible circumstance that old Isaiah of Jerusalem, he of the messianic visions of chapters 9 and 11, could also have been the recipient of God’s revelation as to the return of his future brothers and sisters from the desert of exile and disgrace. Let us concede that if God can create the universe with the Word, He can endow poor Isaiah with enough prescience to know that water makes the desert bloom and that it is indeed a messianic age that sees the lame leap and the mute sing for joy!
3. The whole of that is chapter 35 constitutes the lesson for the pericope. It is set between oracles that pronounce judgment upon “the nations” (chapter 34) and a narrative that describes the historical situation of the turn of the 8th century (in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah” when “King Sennecherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them.” (cf. II Kings 18:13-37 and II Chronicles 32:1-19). The narrative continues in chapters 37 and 38 with Hezekiah in dialogue with Rabshakeh, the Assyrian general legate sent to dictate the terms to the hapless Jew, and with Isaiah, who assured him of Jerusalem’s security in the face of the threat.
4. The section includes the plague enforced by the angel of the LORD, striking down thousands in the Assyrian camp and sending Sennecherib home to his assassination by sons Addram’melech and Share’zer. Another son, Esarhaddon, succeeded him (37:36-38). The section concludes with stern words from Isaiah to Hezekiah: “Days are coming when all that is in your house, and that which your ancestors have stored up until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the LORD. Some of your own sons who are born to you shall be taken away; they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.” Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “The word of the LORD that you have spoken is good.” For he thought: “There will be peace and security in my days.” This perspective alone should have excluded Hezekiah from his favorable evaluation by the Deuteronomist in the Kings account. Peace and security in my time, indeed!
5. At any rate, the narrative clearly recalls in chapters 36-39 the climactic events of the end of the 8th century, finally placing in the mouth of Isaiah the Babylonian-conquest prophecy and confiding Hezekiah’s asinine private reaction. Hezekiah is not such much different from the rest of us, men and women whose concern is our time and our prosperity, at the expense of the fate of our great-grandchildren, saddling them with large debts due in fiscal government and environmental payback—rationalizing moral decline so long as the stock market rises and more jobs are created. For they thought, “there will be peace and security in our days.”
6. Why not then concede the vision in chapter 35 to the same initial Isaiah? If he knows Babylon from the disclosure of the LORD, then he can also know redemption and return. The picture describes the universe that would welcome a messiah, one that a prophet might imagine if accustomed to the geography for dry and barren lands sparse as to grazing, thirsty ground not fit for farming, rough terrain hardly fit for travel. If the geography is blighted so also the anthropology that informs the prophet: weak hands, feeble knees, fearful hearts, blind eyes, deaf ears, crippled legs, mute voices (everything but a face that would stop a clock, a mind skewed or disengaged, and a candidate for Viagra or Cialis—although weak hands, feeble knees and fearful hearts might well describe also the latter!). The desolate landscape is parallel to the desolate humanity, itself devoid of avenues of sensation…sight, sound, speech, mobility, strength—all are in short supply or utterly missing.
7. It is a dry and barren land that would welcome a swamp! The streams that bloom the desert are only refreshing, like oases now blooming and verdant. The prophet cannot but associate swamps with “plenty of water.” He does not know mosquitoes and mire. Give me water and I will drain swamps, build canals, irrigate the land. Water is only life-giving, not erosive or flooding, stagnant or noxious. This is the messiah-vision of a desert people, whose lives are as parched and barren as the terrain, whose captivity is palpable and enforced. Like the apostle James after him, Isaiah knew the value of water in an arid land. For him, the advent of the messiah is colored green, rather than blue or purple.
8. If the geography is telling, so is the anthropology. What we have here are the basics: the eyes of the blind opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame leaping like deer, the tongues of the mute singing for joy. Jesus knew the passage, as did John the Baptizer: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” To John’s inquiry about his credentials as “the one who is to come,” Jesus rehearses Isaiah’s vision and ups the ante: cleaning lepers and raising the dead evoke chords deeper in the human psyche, the one being grounds for utter social scorn and the other being the universal human prospect.
9. Isaiah is more modest but no less optimistic. Barren ground and blighted lives will be the beneficiaries of God’s inauguration. The ransomed of the LORD will return to Zion singing, everlasting joy upon their heads. In the last verse of the chapter Isaiah hints what Jesus overtly declares: They shall obtain joy and gladness while sorrow and sighing shall flee away. That sorrow and sighing shall flee presupposes Death’s final destruction. Isaiah wisely leaves it to the One Who is to Come to give substance to the promise.
10. The geography of souls in this land of plenty is less a desert than a swamp. We are mired in materialism, soggy with sensation, drowning in possessions (and not a little “self-possessed”). If our tongues are speechless it is only as to our prayers; otherwise, we are blathering self-absorbed mantras of riches, as oblivious to the essential barrenness of our lives as we are to the persistent cries of the poor. It is a swamp of our own making, having turned pristine paradise into a den of iniquity as surely as did our first parents in a garden more confined, a time more simple. Too many of us resemble creatures like blind Gollum, holding on to our “pretty” deep in the underground of selfishness. Instead of streams for a desert, the more proper prophetic messianic image for our time is a cautious emergence from the black lagoon into the bright sunlight of the Son of Righteousness.
11. We are a church in what seems a self-imposed, even celebrated, exile. We erode and disrespect the Messiah, the One Who is Coming, by making Him one among many possible legitimate avenues to God. We reverse God’s incarnation by locating the “god within ourselves.” The Good News we preach to the poor is more often “empowerment” than “gospel,” more fueled by government advocacy and social policy than by deeds of love and mercy. Our spiritual desert is a willful blindness; our spiritual swamp teems with deities global and private. We are at once both arid and drowning, both barren and promiscuous.
12. But whether desert or swamp, or both, as to the geography of land or souls, it is indeed the Messiah who comes. Isaiah could see it, from the uncertain terminus of the 8th century. Jesus knew it as he knew Isaiah. “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert….And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” We have seen His day—and we shall see it. Thanks be to God.
JLY
12.08.98 …. Rev. 12.07.04
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