Someone I know (a dedicated church-goer, I must add) was telling me that she knew the difference between Lent and Advent. Lent is when we give things up, Advent when we try to do something good. Get me another gin... (For the record, fasting is useless unless one also knows how to feast. But that's another topic for another post.)
Israel knew it from ancient times - the early church Fathers preached on the topic - but we've forgotten that our faith looks both backwards and forwards. (Anyone who sees the ultimate end as judgement and condemnation will receive 100 years in purgatory.) I have been privileged to study Old Testament theology in some depth, with insight from brilliant scholars, both Jewish and Christian, and there is a lesson we can learn from ancient Israel. We really have nothing we can offer except worship - and a vocation of being icons of the transcendent God. Yet those of us who are Christian need to take care, in reading the Old Testament, that we do not think only of the unique immanence in Jesus.
I could undoubtedly write a book on Isaiah, or at least quote a hundred far better minds than mine who already did so. What I record here is a mere sampling. I'm referring here specifically to "Deutero-Isaiah" - the 'third book,' comprising the 40th through 55th chapters. Israel had returned from the Babylonian exile, and was confronted with conflicting demands of Babylonian culture. Jerusalem had far less splendour than the great empires of the time! Perhaps this can remind of Yahweh's transcendence and utter mystery. He chose a nation, but without splendour such as that of empires - it is a call, for each of us, for the old notions to die. It is first in Deutero-Isaiah that one sees constant themes of redeeming love; suffering that is vicarious rather than punishing; and striking monotheism.
Christians can easily forget, since Judaism developed in wisdom enormously post-exile (long before Jesus and the apostles), that Yahweh's precedence over any other god was long established for Israel, but monotheism a much later development. Yahweh surely was proving to be a most puzzling God, and the people of Israel, surrounded by cosmological myths of Babylon (which perhaps spurred an interest in creation), were faced with paradox. Yahweh's transcendence and immanence are strong in Isaiah. Israel was to share in a glory they could only grasp from afar, yet were its icon to all nations. They are called as a nation - despite never having been more than a small nation state, and now are returning to a crushed Jerusalem.
Crushed by the Babylonian exile, and still under Persian dominion (though Cyrus was one to announce commissions from the gods of whomever he was addressing at the moment), it indeed must have appeared that the gods of Babylon or Persia 'had the edge' - and that Yahweh called his own to a sort of glory which has no element of earthly wealth and power. Isaiah, unlike some other prophets, is expressing no hope for a restored monarchy, other than that of God Himself. Israel's faith, as with that seen in much later Christian thought, is largely orthopraxy and hope - one is striving for a share in glory, but can barely grasp the concept, and it seems fulfilment is always in the future (and glimpses of it never understood at the time.)
Here is a God who is transcendent, yet suffers with his people. One wonders if, during the time in Babylon, Israelites had generally felt they could worship Yahweh on other gods' territory. Yahweh is lord of all nations and of history, working even through pagans such as Cyrus or Pharaoh. One could receive the impression, in creation myths of other cultures, whatever their relationship to Genesis in genre, that creation is an accident, and mankind here to be the servant of the gods - where, for Israel, the nation makes present, and this to the edification of other nations, the transcendent God. Israel suffered consequences for her own infidelity, yet, and this strikingly in Isaiah, suffering is not a punishment for sin, and indeed may be vicarious. It occurs to me that the bond between Israel and Yahweh has an intimacy where (in the immanent) they seem nearly identical. Varies scholars differ on the identity of the Suffering Servant: a prophet, Israel, or God Himself - and the interpretation can vary from line to line!
Klaus Koch, in The Prophets focuses on the eschatological, with this occurring within history. Israel, in its history, is servant of God, "in the light of an ultimate, divine purpose - which has not attained its goal but gives promise of a future." Atonement means liberation from spheres of human misdeeds and consequent disaster - it is not appeasement (as was typical in tales of the old gods.) The attack on idols is a precedent. It is not only a concept of Yahweh as pure, transcendent spirit - God's spirit is manifested visibly in the world. What is rejected is a God at the disposal of humans - artefacts being dependent on their makers.
I'm on verge of writing that book I promised I wouldn't - so let me just leave you with a few points to ponder from George Angus Knight's Servant Theology. Knight terms the 'servant chapters' of Isaiah (40-55) as "the answer to the why for Jeremiah or Habakkuk." The chapters are a poem about God's relationship to his servant Israel, in whom he has determined to glorify himself. "(Isaiah's) great contribution to our biblical faith is insistence that the living Word of the living God began to be united with the very flesh of God's son Israel." Word and divine action are conjoined at every great moment in Israel's story - 'Comfort ye' interposes angelic beings between the word of God and the word of the prophet. Despite the tragedy of captivity, God's purpose for the universe is his word of comfort to his covenant people.
Knight's thought continues: Despite the tragedy of captivity, God's purpose for the universe is his word of comfort to his covenant people. Divine righteousness deals with sin and evil, saving us out of negation into God's joyous way of life. "Both Cyrus and Israel are used by God to establish his rule of saving love." God is actively creative, saving love - goodness is not static.
I promise to write a humorous entry very soon, but, as long as I've gone this far, I'll mention a few more of Knight's excellent thoughts:
- "The glory of the Lord shall be revealed." Contrast to much of the past, when none could see God and live.
- "So wholly other is Yahweh, so positive when (our) thoughts and life are merely negative, that, if man essays to conceive of God in any form at all, (there is eventual) blasphemy." The negative cannot conceive of the positive - one is left only with an idol of gold. (Elizabeth adds: the more one cherishes one's faith and worship, perhaps the more one fears or even feels that there is no God. Actually, as I was fortunate to be reminded today, it actually is that there are no gods! The 'gods' who need appeasement, placating, and the like are the old ones - who are highly powerful versions of ourselves at our worst.)
- We cannot know God as he is in himself - but he allows us to behold his glory, however much it is beyond our understanding.
- The Lord of Hosts reminds us that this is a sacramental universe - a unified cosmos (heaven and earth.) God's hosts can be angels and Israel
- Pain Israel refused to bear (they had broken the covenant; refused to be the sacrificial beast in 43:24) was concomitant with being the Servant of God to the world. Therefore, God Himself ultimately is the Servant. (44:28 - Cyrus is an historical instrument of cosmic purpose, unaware.)
When I use such works for lectio, or even when I utter words of the liturgy (as I do many times - daily), I'm struck with awe, and concurrently with the idea that I don't understand it at all. Maybe I'm getting the idea...
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