Comfort, give comfort to my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her
that her service is at an end,
her guilt is expiated;
indeed, she has received from the hand of the LORD
double for all her sins.
A voice cries out:
In the desert prepare the way of the LORD!
Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill shall be made low;
the rugged land shall be made a plain,
the rough country, a broad valley.
Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together;
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.
Go up on to a high mountain,
Zion, herald of glad tidings;
cry out at the top of your voice,
Jerusalem, herald of good news!
Fear not to cry out
and say to the cities of Judah:
Here is your God!
Here comes with power
the Lord GOD,
who rules by his strong arm;
here is his reward with him,
his recompense before him.
Like a shepherd he feeds his flock;
in his arms he gathers the lambs,
carrying them in his bosom,
and leading the ewes with care.
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The God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are very different.
For many philosophers, God is passionless, remote, unmoved and unchanging. The Scriptures paint a very different portrait of God. Anger and wrath are present, to be sure, but so is disappointment, sorrow, affection and tenderness. The latter — tenderness — is the dominant theme in Isaiah’s famous comfort or consolation prophecy.
The prophecy was given in Babylon, towards the end of Israel’s long captivity and exile in the mid-sixth cen tury B.C. Isaiah ecstatically proclaimed the good news: God was going to lead them back to Judah to begin life anew. Their captivity was over; the debt had been paid in full.
God was going to do what God does best: comfort and console the people and speak tenderly to them. The image of the shepherd carrying the lambs in his arms and gently leading the mother sheep completes the picture.
Much remained to be done — the people had to be prepared and things set in motion. Preparing the way for God in the wilderness, filling in valleys and levelling mountains, meant removing all obstacles and hindrances. Some might have become too comfortable and settled in Babylon, finding it hard to leave behind all that they had known. Others might have needed to put aside grievances, resentments and factionalism.
They had to be very clear about why they were going home and what was expected of them. It would not be just picking up their old way of life where it had been interrupted 50 years before, for that life had led to their collective disaster. Their ideals and intentions had to be clear and pure for their restoration to be complete and successful.
The voice proclaiming “Here is your God!” made it very clear that this was God’s show, not theirs. Remaining resolutely focused on God and God’s ways is the antidote for fear, hopelessness and loss of meaning.
In our own day, more voices need to proclaim God’s faithful love and sovereignty over the world, but they need to speak from inner conviction and personal experience rather than ideology and desire for power. God is alive and present for those willing to see.
People are impatient and find waiting on God very difficult. We all have our own timetables for when events are supposed to unfold — and it is usually “the sooner the better.” The author of 2 Peter reminded his impatient community that God’s timetable and concept of time is totally different from our own.
A day and a thousand years are interchangeable, for God is eternal. Things will happen when God decides and not before. Some scary end-time imagery is thrown in for the sake of motivation, but this is not necessary for the point he is trying to make: Use your time on Earth wisely. Live in godliness and holiness and be at peace with God. It does not matter when the new heavens and new Earth will be created, for we can create these realities in ourselves and our communities by the lives we lead.
Isaiah’s prophecy had multiple lives. It was used by the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls to describe their preparatory mission and by the evangelists to define that of John the Baptist. His job was to level the mountains and fill in the valleys to prepare the way for Jesus the Messiah.
This passage from Isaiah is matched with the beginning of the Gospel according to Mark that starts with a brief passage about John the Baptist in preparation for the story of the baptism of Jesus - there is no birth or infancy narrative in Mark or John.
The insight of Scott Lewis is interesting to me because through writing about the ideology of materialism it has reached a point where I think it is founded in an unnoticed and unconsidered truth of how we think instead of being a revelation of an unmitigated view of the universe we live in or, in fact, an accurate view of our own selves. We don't have an unmitigated knowledge of any of it, everything we can articulate, everything we can think is mitigated by the conditions of the apparatus of our thinking. We have no direct and complete knowledge of anything.
I think the philosopher's view of God or, the possibility of there being a god is thoroughly a product of such mitigation, of making God into something that can fit into our imaginations just as certainly as physics and chemistry are unadmitted attempts to encompass a smaller but still overwhelming reality as if we could understand the whole thing. That act of mitigation is turning what we can't hope to encompass into something we can deal with without the constant focus on the inadequacy of our view of things.
In philosophy as in all of academic and, even more so, all human culture, from highest to lowest brow, we are constantly trying to wrap our heads around things. In pop culture that attempt is made EZ by focusing on the unimportant (fashion) the stupidly attractive (show biz) and the excitingly and gratifyingly unimportant and stupid. Modernism, the pretense that the very specialized methods that work, to a useful extent, in physics and chemistry are infinitely extendable to everything has just about reached the limit of that pretense.
The fact is outside of some very useful applications in the hard sciences and, with some very important instances, in the life sciences, the scientific method is not only inapt, it is bound to fail. To the extent that theoretical physics or science believes it's ability to come up with such a hard, direct knowledge of things is the extent to which it is a delusion. And with that failure will, tragically, come the discrediting of genuine science that can help us to understand the world for the purposes for which science is best put.**
The Babylonian captivity was the removal of the elite of Jerusalem to put them under the control of the scientific powerhouse of its time. We in the West largely bought the Greek propaganda that what it took from other people, much of it from Babylon, was a product of the Greeks but a lot of it was knowledge developed in what is now Iraq and Iran as well as Egypt. Much of that maligned culture, we now know, was the development of mathematics and science which the Greeks either documented or developed further.
I wonder if there isn't an implication in the thirst of the returning population that Isaiah addresses to leave that powerhouse of intellectual life that they found that to be inadequate as compared to the far different tradition of radical justice as found in the Exodus tradition. If the Scriptural abuse of Babylon meant anything, it wasn't the knowledge developed there that was found inadequate by the Hebrews, it was the absence of the kind of radical justice that led, in the telling of Isaiah, to their displacement from Jerusalem in the first place.
*
Definition of mitigate
transitive verb
1 : to cause to become less harsh or hostile : mollify aggressiveness may be mitigated or … channeled— Ashley Montagu
2a : to make less severe or painful : alleviate mitigate a patient's suffering
b : extenuate attempted to mitigate the offense
** Richard Lewontin warned his fellow scientists about the consequences of scientists overselling science a quarter of a century ago. I think the ease with which the Republican-fascists have discredited the scientific knowledge and advice around Covid-19 is a result of that ideological overreach by scientists and the sci-rangers of the popular media.
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