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]
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
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]
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]
[1]
Paul D. Hanson, Isaiah 40-66 in the Interpretation Bible Commentary series
(Louisville: John Knox Press, 1989), 240-241.
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