One Cranky Prophet

I’ve been reading Isaiah this month, two chapters a day.  Reading Isaiah is like riding a yo yo: up and down; up and down.  The mood changes almost mid-sentence from righteous judgment to gracious reconciliation—but let’s start at the beginning.

The LORD strides upon the scene, calling out his grievance to the heavens and the earth:

“Children have I reared and brought up

but they have rebelled against me.”  (Is. 1:2b)

This is the problem: the rest of Isaiah (and all the prophets, come to think of it) chew on that theme: Ah, sinful nation: sick desolate, ruined.  These are the judgments of the Lord, but also the natural consequences of cutting themselves off from the very Creator who put the breath in their bodies.  That breath remains and not only commits Israel to him, but commits him to Israel.  He has bound himself to them, and difficulties immediately arise.

For the first four chapters (and throughout the book) a personality emerges that a psychiatrist would label schizophrenic.  Reams of condemnation roll out, alternating with brief passages that look like the speaker is reconsidering: “Come, let us reason together . . .”

“. . . they shall beat their swords into ploughshares . . .”

“Zion shall be redeemed. . . ”

“It shall be well with the righteous . . .”

The weight of sin and rebellion drags the oracle down, down, down—but still it struggles to rise.

Chapters 5 and 6 forge a theme for the first “Book” of Isaiah (chapters 1-39).  The case against “my people” is accurate and detailed and could apply to “our people” today.  And if our people complain about His peevishness, vindictiveness, arbitrariness, and cruelty, here’s his answer:

The LORD of hosts is exalted in justice,

and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.

He can’t be holy and righteous without judging.  And he can’t judge without holiness and righteousness.

But—what about those people, whom he made and shaped and breathed immortal souls into?  As the rock-ribbed Calvinists say, he has every right to send all of them to hell.  There is none righteous; no, not one.  But—

He has committed himself, by his very breath.

What to do?

That (speaking in purely human terms) is the Divine Dilemma.  “Children have I reared and brought up . . .”  Every parent with wayward children can sympathize.  What do you do?

You don’t stop loving them—unless you never really loved them in the first place.  If you saw your kids as an extension of yourself, intended to draw praise back to you for how well you raised them, it might not be that hard to cut them off: Sayonara, punk.  You had your chance and you blew it.

But even if there’s a smidgen of love in your complicated feelings, there’s at least that much pain.  Love is a risk.  I might even say that love is risk.  You’ve cut yourself open to admit the unknown; a being that brings its own complexity, hidden dangers, and uncertain future.  And it turns on you.  That which promised to complete you now claws at you and threatens your very identity.

God doesn’t need us for completion.  Still, what do you do . . . if you are God?  Two choices:

One, you let it go.  Let the heedless children destroy your house, trample your rules, leave your righteousness in tatters.  In the process they choke on their own autonomy and you cease to be righteous and thus no longer God.  They’ve squandered their identity and stolen yours.  Nobody wins.

Two: you exercise your righteous judgment, stop the oppression, punish the oppressors.  You are still God, but your creation is stuck in an endless round of destruction and renewal (see the book of Judges) until it exhausts itself.  Technically, you win . . . but not really, if your grand experiment reveals itself to be a failure and the fiery hallways of hell ring with Satan’s laughter.

Or wait—there’s a third option.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given . . .  (Is. 9:6)

Higher criticism insists that this child is a contemporary born into the royal household, a brief uptick in Judah’s downward drift.  But the extravagant language—Mighty God, Everlasting Father, etc.—is a bit much, even for court-flattery.  The child the virgin conceives may be the son of a virtuous, recently-married young woman of Isaiah’s time.  But there’s another Son, another sign given to a later virgin who wonders, “Wait . . . how can this be?”

Tucked among Isaiah’s fiery images and agonized and wrathful pronouncements wrung from Israel’s struggle with God, a Man emerges.  A promised child, like Isaac and Samson; a sapling from the seed of Jesse like David; a servant and prophet like Moses, a sacrificial victim like . . . no one else.

He’s the third way, the resolution of an impossible dilemma and the reconciler of opposites.

Then It Happened

And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus . . .” Luke 1:30-31.

About six months have gone by on earth before Gabriel again leaves the presence of the LORD to appear in Galilee, a province of Roman-occupied Palestine and the breeding ground of prophets, cult leaders, and zealots. The object of the angel’s visit is none of those notable persons, just an unremarkable Jewish girl of fifteen or so, going about her business.

She’s a good girl; we can say that much.  An obedient, dutiful girl, most likely busy with the same domestic chores as all her friends and acquaintances, and her mother’s and grandmother’s friends and acquaintances.  Like most girls in their mid-teens, she is engaged—betrothed, in the formal, legally-binding sense of that word.  Her parents have made a suitable match with Joseph the carpenter, and within the year she’ll be married.  A good girl, but nothing in the record indicates she was notably pious or holy.

Then Gabriel shows up.

Does her world go sideways when he appears?  Yes, although she may not recognize at first just how disruptive his presence is.

How can this be? is her first question, and though it sounds similar to the response of Zechariah, it’s not.  He was asking for proof; she, for clarification.  She knows how babies are made, and is quite certain that the necessary deed has not yet taken place.  Gabriel’s explanation can’t be that helpful, for he describes something that has never, ever, happened before—not even to the revered matriarch Sarah, who conceived in her nineties.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—

the Son of God.”

We only see Mary.  We can’t read her mind.  I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me as you’ve said is a positive response—but really, what can you say to a heavenly being who suddenly blazed up beside your kneading trough?  The angel’s words make grammatical sense but don’t match up with anything in her experience or knowledge.  Her answer does not indicate comprehension, merely obedience.  And that is enough.  Her faith may be smaller than a mustard seed, but it’s real faith.

Perhaps not even Gabriel knows the full dimensions of what he’s saying, or how this story will tell itself.  The Lord of Hosts is making his move, that’s certain, but what does it mean?  The very heavens will look on with growing wonder while events unfold.

Meanwhile, Mary waits.

When did it happen?  Sometime between the messenger’s visit and Mary’s journey to visit her cousin Elizabeth; that’s all we know.  The Holy Spirit will come upon you . . . In the old days, the Spirit was known to “rush upon” people, like the mighty Samson;1 Mary may have wondered if it would be like that.  Did she recognize the moment of conception, or did it steal secretly upon her?  Only one thing we can know for sure: There was a moment.  A biological clock was ticking as a tiny egg made its way down the fallopian tube, in the manner of all women since Eve, and in a moment, the power of the Most High overshadowed it.

They say the universe exploded from a single, impossibly dense speck of matter.  The power that exploded the universe is suddenly packed into a single cell.

How can this be?

The first time Yahweh visited his people it was on a mountain with thunder and lighting and an earthquake—they couldn’t miss it.  This time, almost everybody missed it. The last time, Yahweh delivered detailed instructions for a tent and holy furnishings and elaborate sanctification rituals to accommodate his Presence.  The main ingredient was blood—lots of blood.

This time he delivers his Presence, slipping silently into the forward motion of time.  Rather than gold and incense, he is surrounded by pulsing veins and twitching cells.  The holy has taken up residence within the lowly. From a single cell, Christ is formed.

And he brings the blood.  Six weeks pass as cells feverishly divide and separate, knitting the Son of God in the form of a son of man: a head, eyes, limbs, lumps of flesh that will become fingers and toes and then . .  .

With a spasm, a tiny, mighty heart clenches in its first heartbeat.  Ka-thump ka-thump ka-thump Ka-thump Ka-thump—

            the life  

             is in    

            the blood.2

It beats and beats and beats and floods the little body with the same oxygen, the same fuel and food as we all receive in this stage of our lives. But the life of the world is in that blood.

Our mothers don’t know exactly when our hearts began beating, and Mary isn’t aware of it either. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit keep their counsel.  But she knows the unthinkable has happened—she has been caught up in heavenly councils and entrusted with a heavenly secret. “My soul magnifies the Lord, sings the peasant girl, because her soul has been magnified.

  • When did your heart begin beating? When will it stop?  Does it make any difference to you knowing that there was a similar moment for Jesus (both starting and stopping)?  Do you think his heart beats even today?

1 For example, Judges 14:6

2 Lev. 17:11

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