“Why a Messiah?” - December 3, 2017

Isaiah 64:1-9

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
   so that the mountains would quake at your presence— 
as when fire kindles brushwood
   and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
   so that the nations might tremble at your presence!”  [Isaiah 64:1-2]

Biblical scholars suggest that the book of Isaiah incorporates the words and the experience of more than one prophet, but that it covers a span of events that can be taken as one distinct and increasingly disastrous period in the history of the kingdom of Judah.  Judah was the part of Israel around Jerusalem that had survived conquest by Assyria in 722 B.C. but would not survive invasion by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.  A handful of survivors, including the prophet, became prisoners of war.  Some of them were forced into exile.  Some of them became slaves.  All of them bore with them the horrors of what had happened.

“Your holy cities have become a wilderness,
   Zion has become a wilderness,
   Jerusalem a desolation. 
Our holy and beautiful house,
   where our ancestors praised you,
has been burned by fire,
   and all our pleasant places have become ruins. 
After all this, will you restrain yourself, O Lord?” [Isaiah 64:10-12]

In exile, their captors had no trouble making them relive the moments of devastation for their own amusement.  Psalm 137 tells of that, and what it did to them.

“By the rivers of Babylon—
   there we sat down and there we wept
   when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
   we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
   asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
   ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ 

How could we sing the Lord’s song
   in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
   let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
   if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
   above my highest joy. 

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
   the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down!
   Down to its foundations!’
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
   Happy shall they be who pay you back
   what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
   and dash them against the rock!”

There you have one response to genocide and to horror, to the uncaring and unashamed lust for power that cares nothing for the suffering of the helpless and the innocent: the desire for revenge.

Have you heard about the sentences in trials of Balkan war criminals that were handed down last week?  For many of the victims, they do not do enough.  And then there was the insult of the Croatian man who managed to get hold of poison and drank it in the courtroom and died, thinking to subvert justice.  For that matter, I find myself wondering what kind of human justice could ever even up the score when you consider what misery and terror these people and their confederates inflicted on entire towns without signs of mercy or conscience.  A quick execution seems to let them off lightly.  What victim could be blamed for feeling disappointment or for even seeking comfort in the thought that such people meet a fuller judgment beyond death?

The enormity of such crimes, and the cruelty that is part of them, is that they are so systematic.  It is not just one angry perpetrator, or even one twisted mind or warped soul that does these things.  If it were, there would be some level of compassion somewhere, some ability to say that wrong had been done in a fit of rage or had grown out of an uncontrollable insanity.  That is not to excuse it, but to make it understandable.  That would be to make it possible to categorize it and put it onto some mental shelf somewhere, the way that a medical museum puts terrible tumors or painful growths into jars and says, “Look what happens when things go wrong.”

But here it is a matter of cold, deliberate policy.  It is what names mass murder as “ethnic cleansing” or torture as “enhanced interrogation techniques”.  It is what relabels evil as expedience.  It is what happens when the powerful decide that others are expendable, as when Caiaphas the high priest stood before a council of his peers and explained that they should have no hesitation to hand Jesus over to the Romans, saying:

“You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” [John 11:50]

Wrong can be confronted and corrected.  People do terrible things and then cry out, “What have I done?”  There is hope in that.  There is the beginning of repentance.  Evil says, “I have done nothing wrong.  I don’t really need to justify my deeds, but if you must know, I do everything for the greater good.”  So if wrong can be confronted, evil must be resisted and opposed.

Thus there appeared among the Jews in exile a hope that went beyond revenge.  There arose a holy longing for one who would, at God’s behest, be more than the prophet calling in the wilderness.  There arose a faith that God would send a chosen one, a messiah, who would go to the heart of the deepest evils of the world and tell them, “No!  No, you don’t overrule God!  You do not get to declare what is acceptable.  You may not disguise yourself any longer as other than you are.”  It is like what happened when Jesus met a man filled with demons and cast them out and they fled into a herd of pigs, and then not even the pigs could bear to host them and jumped into the sea and drowned. [Matthew 8:28-33]

Isaiah expresses the longing for deliverance from the structures of oppression more clearly than any other, expresses it on behalf of himself and of his people and of all who are tugged into the grinding machinery of unresponsive and heartless wickedness.  And in his cry the people heard more than pain.  What they heard was God’s promise of deliverance to come.  Paul Hanson puts it this way:

“The doubts, the contradictions, the tensions, the pains that have been expressed in the lament are not thereby resolved.  But they are lifted up in one final impassioned plea to the only one who can help.  Memory of God’s gracious saving acts of the past remains intertwined with the hardships of day-to-day existence.  In the act of lament and supplication, troubles do not vanish, but human vision is lifted above human helplessness to the heavenly parent.  In such a situation, where no human parent deserving of the name could remain unmoved, is it possible to imagine that the source of love will remain silent? …Therefore, even when God seems to have withdrawn, the suffering faithful individual and the stricken faithful community persist in directing their cries to the heavenly parent, ‘Yet, O Lord, you are our Father.’”[1]

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[1] Paul D. Hanson, Isaiah 40-66 in the Interpretation Bible Commentary series (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1989), 240-241.