by CCW | 8 December 2012 20:41
This is the first of a two-part series on “The Advent in Isaiah”. The second part is posted here[1]. A pdf document containing the full text of both parts can be downloaded here[2].
Isaiah is “the most evangelical of the prophets,” a seventeenth century Anglican Divine, Anthony Sparrow, observes. And, certainly, of all the prophets it is safe to say that Isaiah is, perhaps, the best known and, perhaps, even the most read of all of the Books of the Prophets, at least in the liturgies of the Church, and the one prophet, too, whose words have inspired some of the greatest music of all times. One has only to think of Handel’s Messiah or many of the Bach cantatas.
In the Advent season particularly, readings from The Book of the Prophet Isaiah stand out and compel our attention. Readings from Isaiah, for instance, are prominent in the wonderful service of Advent Lessons and Carols. In the season of the preparation for the celebration of Christ’s holy birth, images and phrases from Isaiah help to shape our understanding of the mystery and the wonder of the Incarnation. For that reason The Book of Isaiah is read at the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer and in the Sunday Offices throughout the Advent and Christmas seasons and into Epiphany. There is, it seems, a prophetic conjunction between Isaiah and the central themes of the Christian Gospel.
The Book of the Prophet Isaiah spans at least two centuries and while it is all collectively The Book of Isaiah, it is probably the work of several writers over several centuries from the latter half of the 8th century to the latter half of the 6th century BC. The scholarly consensus, more or less, is that The Book of Isaiah is best appreciated as three books or one book having three distinct sections: First Isaiah, chapters 1-39; Deutero-Isaiah, chapters 40-55; and, Trito-Isaiah, chapters 56-66. Readings from each of these three divisions of the book figure prominently in the Christian Church’s understanding of the mystery of the Incarnation.
We may take four passages as examples of ‘the Advent in Isaiah’: Isaiah 11.1-9; Isaiah 60.1-6; Isaiah 7.10-15; and Isaiah 40.1-11. The first two will be the focus for this session; the last two at the next.
Isaiah 11. 1-9, read at the Service of Advent Lessons & Carols, opens us out to couplet of themes. There is a twofold reflection upon the Messianic King and the idea of Paradise Restored. The passage has had an enormous influence upon the theological understanding of our humanity, upon the idea of Creation as Paradise, and upon our thinking about the person of Jesus Christ.
It begins with the idea of the Messianic King associated with the line of David. “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse,” it begins, recalling us immediately to The Book of Ruth and to the family tree of King David, the King who united the unruly tribes of Israel in the worship of God centered in Jerusalem, Zion. Jesse is David’s father, his grandfather was Obed, the child whom Ruth, a Moabitess, bore from Boaz but who was nursed by Naomi of Bethlehem, her mother-in-law. The complexity of things within and without Israel is altogether to the point. It is worth noting, too, that Ruth is one of the four women named in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, all of whom are non-Jewish. There is, in other words, an aspect of universality to the way in which the Messiah is envisioned and anticipated.
But this is only the beginning of considerations in Isaiah’s vision, for “the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” The Holy Spirit of God conveys the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit upon the Messiah. The gifts are spiritual principles which speak to heart and mind and which are properties or qualities of the Messiah. The Hebrew text as we have it from much later period than the Greek translation of it, called the Septuagint, names six gifts but the Septuagint itself speaks of the seven gifts of the Spirit. That has defined a whole tradition in the life of the Church Catholic.
But what are these so-called gifts, these qualities of soul that participate or share in the divine nature itself? “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” The Septuagint, probably out of sense of the rhetorical patterns of the Greek language, couples “piety” or devotion with knowledge and makes “the fear of the Lord” a kind of concluding principle. The fear of the Lord refers to honouring or worshipping God.
They are all intellectual and spiritual gifts – things which come from God – that speak to heart and mind. That is significant with respect to theological anthropology, namely, how we understand our humanity in the sight of God. An important feature of the theological understanding of our humanity is the idea of the integration of heart and mind, something which is seen, I would suggest, in the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit. That these gifts are directly associated with the Messiah opens us out to a further significance: these gifts should also be seen as ultimately deriving from the Word and the Spirit of God and as uniting us with God. In other words, these spiritual gifts are principles that come from God to us and that speak to the greater dignity and truth of our humanity as seen in the sight of God.
In the Advent reading of the Church, these gifts that speak to the spiritual qualities of the Messiah are ascribed precisely to the coming of Christ. For Israel, the idea of the Messiah admits of a number of possibilities; principally the idea of a king who will restore Israel to prominence and rule as was partly accomplished in the David’s reign. In the Christian understanding that political theme is inverted. The kingdom that Christ brings is not of this world but signifies a larger sense of redemption, namely, the redemption of the world and our humanity to God.
The passage proceeds to emphasize the qualities of righteous judgment that belong to the Messianic kingship. In a way, it anticipates the “hungering and thirsting” for righteousness in the Beatitudes. It reminds us of the divine basis of all forms of social and political justice. They have to be rooted and grounded in God’s righteousness, a righteousness which acts as a powerful check upon the incomplete forms of human righteousness. We forget this at our peril.
There is the wonderful paradox that the Enlightenment world, the 17th/18th century European world that in some sense impelled the projects of social and political improvements, also recognized the follies and stupidities of human presumption. Wanting to make things better does not necessarily mean that we succeed in making things better; sometimes we make them worst. The great satirical writers like Jonathan Swift and Voltaire provide a much needed cautionary note that applies in equal measure to their world and ours.
In Isaiah 11 the theme of the righteousness of the Messianic reign carries over into the picture of Paradise Restored. We are given a vision of what that righteousness looks like. It is imaged in terms of the harmony of the natural world and the harmony of man and nature but ultimately as dependent upon God’s harmony with his creation restored to truth and righteousness. The sequence of images is powerful and suggestive. Harmony reigns in place of nature red in tooth and claw. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb rather than eat the lamb! This passage provoked the modern prophet of Atheism, Frederick Nietzche, to heights of rhetorical and polemical excess largely animated by his reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species. He argues for the will to power of each and all. The wolf shall devour the lamb; not dwell with the lamb in peace and harmony. It is a different vision and one that, logically, can only lead to abuse and destruction, to darkness and despair, to a world of will without reason.
But Isaiah is recalling us not to the world of the Fall from Paradise but to Paradise Restored. It is a poetic vision that opens us out not to the wildness of nature and man but to our humanity and world as humanized by the righteousness of God, to impossibilities made possible by the grace of God. Wolf and lamb, leopard and kid (goat), calf and young lion, cow and bear, lion and ox – all live in a kind of harmony and peace, the harmony and peace of Paradise Restored by a sense of the rightness of God’s creation. This vision of paradise has its counterpart, too, in the themes of Arcadia from pagan antiquity. But what about our humanity? “And a little child shall lead them,” Isaiah tells us, a little child shall lead the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the cow and the bear! “And the sucking child,” the child as yet unweaned, “shall play,” unharmed, “on the hole of the asp” as well as “on the cockatrice’ den.” These images are recalled at the end of Mark’s Gospel as part of the testimony to the power of the new life of the Resurrection.
“They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain,” Isaiah concludes, “for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” God makes himself known in his truth and righteousness and there is peace and harmony.
It is a marvellous collocation of images that open us out to the power of prophecy. It shows us the divine vision for our world and our humanity. In the Christian understanding of things, it shows us the meaning of Bethlehem, the very place to which the Advent brings us. For the Messianic King and the theme of Paradise Restored is the Christian meaning of the humble scene of Christ’s holy birth in Bethlehem. That story and scene is enlarged by our reading of Isaiah.
This leads us to the next passage, a passage that also appears in the Advent and Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols. Yet, it also forms one of the Church’s canticles, the scriptural songs of praise that complement the readings of Scripture at Morning and Evening Prayer. The passage is Isaiah 60. 1-6. It forms the Christian Church’s canticle known as the Surge, Illuminare. It is found in The Canadian Book of Common Prayer (1962) on page 28.
“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” This passage from Trito-Isaiah strikes all of the notes of Advent expectancy and anticipation. It catapults us into the mystery of the Word and Son of God as Light. It opens us out to the profounder ramifications and significance of Christ’s holy birth. For in the birth of Christ, there is even more than Paradise Restored in terms of the harmony of nature, man and God. There is the further idea of the gathering together of all of the forms of our humanity. Once again there is the note of universality: “the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee” and the riches of the nations shall flow unto thee. “And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.”
Light. It is one of the great and grand themes of the Advent. Here it is signaled for us in Isaiah. The light is the light of God that breaks into the darkness of our world and day. Advent is about the Light of God coming to us, the Light which the darkness cannot comprehend, the Light which is life and grace, truth and mercy. In the Christian understanding, that Light is Christ, the Word and Son of the Father who comes as the Light of the World. It is only the darkness of our refusals that stands in the way; such is our way, not God’s way.
In the great Christmas Gospel, John 1. 1-14, this is made explicitly clear. There is the coming of God’s Word, Son and Light to our dark world and there is either our refusal or our embrace of that Word, Son and Light, the Word made flesh. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” These words should make us tremble and shake. As the poet and preacher John Donne remarks, “God will not save us without our wills but only through our wills.” There has to be our engagement with the God who engages us.
The passage from Isaiah signals the exultant qualities of rejoicing that are about our embrace of the light to a people who are buried in darkness, the darkness of doubt and despair, the darkness of sin and folly, we might say. The passage suggests the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem and names two of the gifts of the Epiphany, the gifts of gold and incense. Myrrh is not named here. It is, of course, the gift which teaches us about Christ’s sacrifice; the sacrifice which is only possible through his Incarnation, through his embrace of the human reality of body and soul.
That theme of light shining in the darkness will be taken up by John, especially in the words of his prologue read on Christmas night. How can we understand those words apart from Isaiah’s words, the words of the Advent in Isaiah? His words illumine so much of the Christian mystery of Christ’s holy birth, the mystery of the Incarnation. He is for that reason “the most evangelical of the prophets.” To read Isaiah in Advent is to be aware of the Advent in Isaiah.
Fr. David Curry
The Advent in Isaiah
Advent Programme
December, 2012
Christ Church, Windsor
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