We stop the song. These are hard words to sing: "From the Lord’s hand." Do we pass them by? Was exile God’s punishment for Isaiah’s sins? May I give three interpretative notes.
First, in the radical monotheism of ancient Israel nothing could happen by chance or accident, apart from the hand of God. At that time you were either a monotheist who ascribed all things to one God or a polytheist who ascribed them to one of a number of gods. Therefore, when I read that something happened "by the hand of God" in the Bible, I interpret it to mean no more than "this thing happened."
Second, in a moral universe, when we sin, harm and hurt others there are natural consequences. This is what is meant by the "judgment" or "wrath" of God. It is not God striking us down with some punishment, but God letting us suffer the consequences of our behavior.
Third, in the minds of the prophets, therefore, exile was the consequence of Israel’s sin; their unfaithfulness to God had weakened them as a nation. To say less would be to make the notion of a moral universe absurd.
But Deutero-Isaiah adds a note both surprising and healing: "You have received double for your sins."
To recognize that our sins have brought damaging consequences is painful, but it is a pain that heals. But there are times we suffer all out of proportion to our sin. God lets the Hebrew people know that he knows their suffering has been out of proportion to their sin.
Say you’ve messed up, and suffered the damaging consequences. But the consequences are much severer then anyone should deserve. Others’ sins have been added to yours and doubled the pain. Or there has been a terrible run of bad luck, or a conspiracy of events, a collision of factors that no one could have controlled or anticipated, and the sum of it all has almost done you in.
God speaks healingly. What you’ve suffered has been all out of proportion. But now your time of suffering is over. What has felt like a sentence of death is now lifted.
Deutero-Isaiah sings the great good news: "Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God." Wonderful image: There’s a great highway stretching from Babylon to Jerusalem. God will lead you out from captivity and take you home. You can go home!
There are times when things conspire -- our own mistakes and others’ and factors bigger than we are -- and we find ourselves fighting for our lives. A death of a loved one has done it and now we’d just as soon die; or divorce or disease, or public disgrace, bankruptcy, war, imprisonment. Exile has many rooms.
Then one day we hear the saving words:
II
Now we go to the second song. Its setting is not the temple with its chants and incense -- where we might have expected John, of the priestly lineage of Aaron -- but rather the wilderness, the red dry desert of Judea near the Dead Sea. It is a place in more ways than one like T.S. Eliot’s "Waste Land":
John’s work is attested not only by the gospels but also by the Jewish historian Josephus, who described him as one who
How did John get from Zechariah and Elizabeth to the Judean desert? It was God’s Spirit that led him to the wilderness. He might well have been tutored by a community holed up in caves near the Dead Sea, the Essenes, a purity movement in Judaism from whom we’ve received the Dead Sea Scrolls. But John was a one-man renewal movement. The hymn describes him well: "Wild and lone."
His path of salvation was twofold: Repent and be washed for the forgiveness of sins.
"Repent" means turn, change your life. And it was aimed at all. When Pharisees and Sadducees came to be washed, he called them a brood of vipers who wanted the water of forgiveness without the repentance. They represented the two main parties of Judaism, so he was calling everyone to repent: Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Pentecostal; all children of Abraham -- Jew, Christian and Muslim. The axe is laid to the root of the tree. When the kingdom comes near, it is clear: All are lost and all need to be saved.
The word of God, as scripture says, is a "two-edged sword." It comes to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. If Deutero-Isaiah comforted the afflicted, John the Baptist, no doubt, afflicted the comfortable.
His priestly robes were made of animal skin; his diet, locusts and wild honey. John was not the kind you liked to invite to Christmas parties. He could stop a conversation! He was an "ascetic," which in the Greek refers to one in serious training. John was God’s athlete trying to prepare Israel for the coming of God.
His pulpit was a rock, his baptistry the Jordan River. His holy temple was the desert, eremos in the Greek, from which we get our word "hermit." The desert was a place of purification where we prepare the way of God into our lives.
John’s repentance was not an emotion, some guilty groveling before God, but was a change of one’s life. Josephus describes his preaching as urging piety and justice -- which were the words used to describe to two tablets of Moses, the Ten Commandments: Piety, the first five pertaining to our relationship to God; and justice, the second five describing our relationship to neighbor.
When they asked what he meant by "fruits worthy of repentance," John said, "Start with the Big Ten! The Ten Commandments."
When they asked for examples, he was not shy to answer:
If you have two coats, give to one who has none.
If you have extra food, the same.
When tax collectors asked, he said: "Collect no more than the law requires" -- for they had the power to extort any amount they could.
When Roman soldiers came and asked, he said: Rob no one by violence and false accusation and be content with your wages -- for they could use their Roman power to exploit anyone they wished.
In short, share what you have with the poor and refrain from exploiting people for personal gain.
What John was doing was redefining what it means to be a child of Abraham -- could there be a more urgent concern today as the three children of Abraham - Jew, Christian, Muslim - are at war? And he pointed to one who gave us a dearer hope: to be children of God.
III
John offers the path of salvation called "desert spirituality."
Nudos amat eremos, wrote Saint Jerome in a letter: "The desert loves to strip bare."
In the sixteenth century Europeans came to the American Southwest. Some became sadistic conquistadores. Others were like Alvar Nuñez, who walked eight years naked across Texas and New Mexico and came out transformed:
John calls us to a desert place within. The spiritual path, wrote Meister Eckhart, has more to do with subtraction than with addition.
"Subtraction!" we say? Our whole lives are built on the assumption that salvation comes by addition: more things, more knowledge, more good deeds, more spirituality, more something.
John says, "First, subtract." We say, "God, don’t take that away from me!" God says, "I’m not here to take anything away from you." The pilgrim path is like backpackers on a trip who learn, sometimes the hard way, what to leave behind.
Annie Dillard tells of the ill-fated 1845 expedition to the North Pole led by Sir John Franklin. Each ship included a 1,700-volume library and full sets of china and crystal, and silver flatware bearing the crests and monograms of the officers. They took no special clothing for the cold, only the uniforms of Her Majesty’s Navy.
They all died, all 138. Twenty years later, their bodies were found buried in the frozen ice. Next to their bodies were found silver flatware hauled across the arctic, a backgammon game, a letter clip. One had a black silk neckerchief around his neck.
Fourth-century desert spirituality taught a path of salvation which consisted of three things: a dying to words, a dying to self and a dying to neighbor.
A dying to words meant a dying even to religious words and to religion itself which props us up but often gets in the way of our relationship to God. Silence is salvation, a dying to your theories and your doctrines.
A dying to self meant a dying to the false self created young to defend you from pain and shaped by the social compulsions of an unredeemed world. Stripped of the false self, you can find your true self in Christ, in whose image you are made. (See Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert).
A dying to the neighbor meant dying to the activity of making judgments about others as a way of bolstering the self. Abba Moses said:
What would happen if you were to decide you didn’t have to make judgments about others, to make any evaluations at all, to realize that God has not appointed you to sift out the good and bad in others? What would you do with all that free time and energy? What then would you do with you? Is this part of what you need to leave behind?
To die to words, to self, to neighbor is to come into the presence of God alone, with nothing to help or to defend you, and to meet there a God who is not a God of judgment, but a God of love, and whose holy love burns away only what you need to lose in order to gain your soul.
John pointed to one who would come and baptize not with water, but with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And when we saw him we met a kindness we never thought love or God could have.
IV
"Comfort ye," cried Deutero-Isaiah. "Repent," cried John. How can these songs become one?
In the Hebrew scripture the word "Repent" means more than anything else "Return," to come home. The first Isaiah wrote:
Here is where "Comfort ye" and "Repent" become the same song: Both are ways to get us home, to return to God, to our own true self, and to people who would love us if we only let them.
(Sometimes we sing "Comfort ye" until grace leads us to repent. Other times we sing "Repent, repent" until grace finally breaks through in comfort.)
So strike up the music.
Prepare for the joyous march home.
Look! Yahweh, the Drum Major, goes forth
Make straight in the desert a highway . . . home!
1. "The Waste Land" in The New Oxford Book of
English Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1972), p. 823.
2. Gary Snyder, The Practice of The Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1990), p.13.
3. Cited in Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press 1998), p. 166.