The effect of Second Isaiah is to energize Israel to fresh faith. But notice the radical, bold, even revolutionary form energizing takes. The prophet employs no psychological gimmicks and no easy meditative steps because the issues are not private, personal, spiritual, or internal. The only serious energizing needed or offered is the discernment of God in all his freedom, the dismantling of the structures of weariness, and the dethronement of the powers of fatigue. (Jesus, in his sayings concerning weariness and rest and changing yokes [Matt 11:28-30] is faithful to Second Isaiah.) Lament is the loss of true kingship, whereas doxology is the faithful embrace of the true king and the rejection of all the phony ones.
As is often suggested, I suggest that these two enthronement formulas of Isa 40:9-11 and 52:7 are the fount from which comes the rest of the poetry. The remainder is an exegesis of this kingship freshly asserted. It is the business of the poet to drive the exiles to a decision about sovereignty because exiles do not want to choose; depressed people do not want to act, and despairing people think it does not matter. But the first step out of exile/despair is the clear embrace of a faithful sovereign and hence the press toward a decision.
First, Second Isaiah contrasts the two kinds of gods in an arrogant way. The one kind just wears you out:
Bel bows down, Nebo stoops,
their idols are on beasts and cattle;
these things you carry are loaded
as burdens on weary beasts. (Isa 46:1)
They must be carried around, and all an exile needs is more dead weight. Contrast this with God who in his freedom needs no exiles to carry him:
Harken to me, O house of Jacob,
all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from your birth,
carried from the womb; . . .
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save. (Isa 46:3-4; see 43:22-24)
If energy is what is in short supply, it is better to find a God who is free, able, and willing to take responsibility for his godness. There is high irony in a weary, despairing exile being in the image of a god who must be carried around because of fatigue. But the adherents of this other God are energized, empowered, and capable of living a faithful life. The contrast I have discerned is not new and has often been discerned, but what I do not want to miss is the socio-political dimension of the poem that adherence to the royal consciousness and its definition of reality make people weary and hopeless. It means nothing to recite such radical poetry unless we are clear about the battle for definition of reality that always lives close to the realities of power.
The contrast of the gods and the ridicule of the Babylonian gods is brought closer by a parallel ridicule of Madam Babylon. What kind of madam is Dame Babylon? A grand dame with courtly manner? A tyrannical old lady? A lady with a house like such a lady keeps? That is all over, for the new history of Israel with Yahweh means the end of this imperial history:
Come down and sit in the dust,
O virgin daughter of Babylon;
sit on the ground without a throne,
O daughter of the Chaldeans!
For you shall no more be called
tender and delicate.
Take the millstones and grind meal,
put off your veil,
strip off your robe, uncover your legs,
pass through the rivers.
Your nakedness shall be uncovered,
and your shame shall be seen. (Isa 47:1-3)
The poet engages in the kind of guerrilla warfare that is always necessary on behalf of oppressed people. First, the hated one must be ridiculed and made reachable, for then she may be disobeyed and seen as a nobody who claims no allegiance and keeps no promises. The big house yields no real life, need not be feared, cannot be trusted, and must not be honored.
When the Babylonian gods have been mocked, when the Babylonian culture has been ridiculed, and when the dethroned king is re-enthroned, then history is inverted. Funeral becomes festival, grief becomes doxology, and despair turns to amazement. Perhaps it is no more than a cultic event, but don’t sell it short because cult kept close to historical experience can indeed energize people. For example, witness the African American churches and civil rights movements or the liberation resistance in Latin America. The cult may be a staging for the inversion that the kings think is not possible. It is the inversion that the grim royal middle class among us does not believe in, and it is the inversion that surprises people who are powerless. Inversions are not easy, not without cost, and never neat and clear. But we ought not underestimate the power of the poet. Inversions may begin in a change of language, a redefined perceptual field, or unaltered consciousness. So his poetry speaks about the inversion even in exile and the images tumble out. Three of them are of particular importance.
New Song
When the new king rules, it is new song time (Isa 42:10). It has always been new song time when the new king arrives and there is no more calling of the skilled mourners who know how to cry on call. The funeral is ended, for now it is festival time. It is time for the children and for all who can sing new songs and discern new situations. The old songs had to be sung in the presence of mockers (Ps 137:3). And they were an embarrassment because they spoke about all that had failed. But new song time is a way to sing a new social reality as the freedom songs stood behind every freedom act. The energy comes from the song that will sing Yahweh to his throne and Babylon to her grave. As Abraham Heschel has seen, only people in covenant can sing. New song time is when a new covenant inaugurates a new mode of reality.
Birth to the Barren
A second image is birth to the barren one. The notion of “barrenness” of course refers to a biological problem of having no children. It is clear, however, that the motif also is treated metaphorically, as in Isa 54:1-3, to refer to a loss of a future and therefore to hopelessness. Thus “barrenness” can refer to a variety of social circumstances; conversely, “birth” then comes to be taken metaphorically as the opening of a future and the generation of an alternative by the miraculous power of God. The notion of barrenness may be taken as a condition of despair in our society. Thus, for example, “eunuchs” of both genders have their manhood and womanhood taken away by the pressure and demand of the corporation, the academy, or the church. Indeed, it is clear that professors and pastors often have their energies and family lives taken from them just as effectively as corporate types. They have insufficient energy to bear or to beget, and who wants to birth new children for Babylon? Our history always begins with the barren, with Sarah (Gen 11:30), with Rebekah (Gen 25:21), with Rachel (Gen 29:31), with Hannah (1 Sam 1:2), and with Elizabeth (Luke 1:7). Among those, always as good as dead (Heb 11:12), the wondrous gift is given. The inability to bear is a curious thing, and we know that for all our science the reasons most often are historical, symbolic, and interpersonal. It is often news—good news, doxology—that brings the new future to effect and the new energy to birth.
So the inversion is the occasion for the poet to speak Israel into a new future:
Sing, O barren one, who did not bear;
bring forth into singing and cry aloud,
you who have not been in travail!
For the children of the desolate one will be more
than the children of her that is married, says the Lord.
(Isa 54:1)
The oldest promises are again set in motion, and Babylon cannot stop them. Whenever the issues are set so that it is God’s promises against Babylon, it is no contest. Babylon cannot stop the energizing of God. He will keep even the promises to mother Sarah.
Nourishment
A third image is that of nourishment. If you eat the bread of Babylon for very long, you will be destroyed. Some liked the bread of Babylon, and they became Babylonians; but Israelites who are exiles will not accommodate that imperial bread. So the poet in his statement about alternative bread dismantles the Babylonian bakery:
Ho, ev
ery one who thirsts, come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, . . . buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy? (Isa 55:1-2)
By the time he has finished talking about bread he has in a deft move articulated the best Israelite promise (to David), the glory of Yahweh (at the expense of the Babylonian god Marduk), and homecoming:
Incline your ear, and come to me;
hear, that your life may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast sure love for David. (Isa 55:3)
Now let me admit that it is perfectly silly to talk about new songs, many births, and fresh bread. These are metaphors that do not seem to touch the reality of today’s hardware and arsenal. Perhaps that is correct, but we must also observe that such items were silly the first time they were named in imperial, scientific Babylon. The hardware will not immediately surrender and the great kings will not readily abdicate power. Consider, for example, the wait through decades in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s twenty-six years in Robin Island Prison. The prophet seeks only to spark the imagination of this people, and that in itself turns despair to energy.
Second Isaiah gives his people a remarkable gift. He gives them back their faith by means of rearticulating the old story. He gives them the linguistic capacity to confront despair rather than be surrounded by it. And he creates new standing ground outside the dominant consciousness upon which new humanness is possible. A cynic might argue that nothing has really changed. And indeed, nothing really changed if only the fall of empires is anything and if it must happen immediately. But prophets are not magicians. Their art and calling are only with words that evoke alternatives, and reshaped hardware will not overcome despair in any case. That will come only with the recognition that life has not been fully consigned to us and that there is another who has reserved for himself his sovereign freedom from us and for us. He is at work apart from us and apart from Babylon. The godness of God takes the form of liberation for exiles. So Gerhard von Rad settled on that most remarkable of all texts that we should not speak until we decide if we trust it:
Remember not the former things,
nor consider things of old.
Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isa 43:18-19)
Those not comforted can hardly believe such a thing can be uttered. But clearly they will have no personal joy, no public justice, no corporate repentance, and no family humaneness until the community receives a newness it cannot generate for itself.
A second majestic text, I believe, is pertinent to the fatigue among us, the fatigue from not deciding or from having settled for Babylon. First about the Lord:
He does not faint or grow weary,
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
(Isa 40:28-29)
And then the promise to all of us exiles:
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint. (Isa 40:30-31)
The poet contrasts us in our waiting and in our going ahead. For those who take initiative into their own hands, either in the atheism of pride or in the atheism of despair, the words are weary, faint, and exhausted. The inverse comes with waiting: renewed strength, mounting up, running, and walking. But that is in waiting.[11] It is in receiving and not grasping, in inheriting and not possessing, in praising and not seizing. It is in knowing that initiative has passed from our hands and we are safer for it. Obviously this becomes more than a critique of Babylon. It is also a critique of every effort to reorganize on our own, and it is a warning about settling in any exile as home.
The newness from God is the only serious source of energy. And that energy for which people yearn is precisely what the royal consciousness—either of Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar—cannot give. The prophet must not underestimate his or her urgent calling, for the community of faith has no other source of newness. I am aware that this runs dangerously close to passivity, as trust often does, and that it stands at the brink of cheap grace, as grace must always do. But that risk must be run because exiles must always learn that our hope is never generated among us but always given to us. And whenever it is given we are amazed.
Jeremiah and Second Isaiah together, poets of pathos and amazement, speak in laments and doxologies. They cannot be torn from each other. Reading Jeremiah alone leaves faith in death where God finally will not stay. And reading Second Isaiah alone leads us to imagine that we may receive comfort without tears and tearing. Clearly, only those who anguish will sing new songs. Without anguish the new song is likely to be strident and just more royal fakery.
* * *
Thomas M. Raitt, A Theology of Exile: Judgment/Deliverance in Jeremiah and Ezekiel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). ↵
John Bright, Jeremiah, AB 21 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965). For different perspectives, see Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile/Homecoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), and Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986). ↵
See John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982), 7–8; K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998) 64–70. ↵
Norman K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, SBT 1/14 (2d ed. Chicago: Allenson, 1962). ↵
Bernhard W. Anderson has explored two quite distinct dimensions of the tradition to which appeal is made; but in each case it is to a specific Israelite tradition. See “Exodus Typology in Second Isaiah,” in Israel’s Prophetic Heritage: Essays in Honor of James Muilenburg, ed. B. W. Anderson and W. Harrelson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 177–95; “Exodus and Covenant in Second Isaiah and Prophetic Tradition,” in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, ed. F. M. Cross et al. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 339–60. ↵
Prophetic ministry must see more clearly than we have in recent time the integral connection between speech and hope! It is only speech that makes hope possible, and when the royal consciousness of technology stops serious speech, it precludes hope. This was seen clearly by Paul in his claim in Rom 10:14-21. ↵
On the subversive power of hope as a way of dismantling, see John M. Swomley Jr., Liberation Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1972). ↵
The richness of the language of Second Isaiah suggests that the poet not only lived in but knew and utilized the literature of his own time; compare especially Klaus Baltzer, Deutero-Isaiah, trans. M. Kohl, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). The links between Job and Second Isaiah on creation theology have been noted by Robert Pfeiffer, “Dual Origin of Hebrew Monotheism,” JBL 46 (1927): 193–206. The possibility that Second Isaiah is a response to the chagrin of Lamentations is worth pursuing. See below, that the poetry of Second Isaiah begins with “Comfort, comfort” (Isa 40:1) is probably a response to the “none to comfort” of Lamentations (1:2, 17). ↵
The reference is only a partially facetious one to June Bingham’s biography of Reinhold Niebuhr, Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Scribner, 1961). That same phrase is not only applicable to the Lord of Israel but is an important prophetic assertion against the immutability of God fostered by the royal consciousness that yearns for eternal stability. ↵
Raitt, A Theology of Exile, 188�
�89. ↵
Such waiting is of course not passivity. See the recent hints by Dorothee Soelle, Revolutionary Patience, trans. Rita Kimber and Robert Kimber (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1977), and the older statement by Christoph Blumhardt under the phrase “Warten und Eilen!” Concerning the dialectic of action and waiting in the Blumhardts, see Karl Barth’s comments in the afterword to Christoph Blumhardt’s Action in Waiting (Farmington, Pa.: Plough, 1998). ↵
5
Criticism and Pathos in Jesus of Nazareth
The dominant consciousness must be radically criticized and the dominant community must be finally dismantled. The purpose of an alternative community with an alternative consciousness is for the sake of that criticism and dismantling. In considering the work of Jeremiah, I have argued that the royal culture of his time was numbed and therefore unable to face any drastic historical ending, and that the only way to penetrate that numbed consciousness of denial was by the public presentation of grief. In his poetry of grief, Jeremiah tried to bring Israel to a sense of the end of a social world that the royal apparatus tried its best to perpetuate. If we are to understand prophetic criticism, we must see that its characteristic idiom is anguish and not anger. The point of the idiom is to permit the community to engage its own anguish, which it prefers to deny. Such a judgment about the way of prophetic criticism suggests that the prophets were keenly aware of how change is effected and were remarkably sensitive to the characteristic ways of openness and resistance.
In this chapter we shall consider how the prophetic ministry of criticism is related to Jesus of Nazareth. Clearly Jesus cannot be understood simply as prophet, for that designation, like every other, is inadequate for the historical reality of Jesus. Nonetheless, among his other functions it is clear that Jesus functioned as a prophet. In both his teaching and his very presence, Jesus of Nazareth presented the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness. He has, in fact, dismantled the dominant culture and nullified its claims. The way of his ultimate criticism is his decisive solidarity with marginal people and the accompanying vulnerability required by that solidarity. The only solidarity worth affirming is solidarity characterized by the same helplessness they know and experience. So now I review several dimensions of that ultimate criticism.
The Prophetic Imagination Page 12