This week we’re going to connect Peter with Mark (13:24, et seq. from last week), and Mark with Isaiah (Deutero-Isaiah, this time). The latter is easy; Mark makes the connection for us. Peter practically does, too, for that matter.
Isaiah 40:1-11We may take one further step in articulating the categories through which we will understand "God as partner." The general dialogic, relational quality of covenantal faith was given special and focused attention by Abraham Heschel in his exposition of YHWH's pathos. While the notion of pathos, especially lined out by Heschel, may be taken specifically in the capacity of God to suffer, in fact the implication of Heschel's work is much broader. It concerns the engagement of YHWH with Israel and with the world, and therefore YHWH's vulnerability and readiness to be impinged upon. The particular focus of Heschel on God's hurt in the traditions of Hosea and Jeremiah makes abundantly clear that the God of Israel is unlike the God of any scholastic theology and unlike any of the forces imagined in any of the vague spritualities available among us. The particular character of this God is as available agent who is not only able to act but is available to be acted upon.I may mention two derivative studies that are primally informed by the work of Heschel. On the one hand, Kazo Kitamori has poignantly written of God's pain. Special attention may be given to his appendix concerning Jeremiah 31:20 QNE Isaiah 63:15. Kitamori notes how discerningly both Luther and Calvin, without any sentimentality, were able to take notice of God's pain. The articulation of that pain, moreover, required the poetic imagination of ancient Israel to speak in terms of bodily upset and consternation, resisting any attempt to permit this God to float off as an ephmeral spirit. The God of dialogic engagement is fully exposed to the realities of life in the world that we might most readily term "creaturely," except that those reatlies are, on the lips of the poets, the realities of the Creator as well.It is obvious that this line of reasoning, so characteristically Jewish, has immense implications for Christian theology. Jurgen Moltmann, informed by the work of Heschel, has forcefully carried the issue of God's vulnerability in Christian theology:"It was Abraham Heschel who, in controversy with Hellenism and the Jewish philosophy of religion of Jehuda Malevi, Maimonides and Spinoza which was influenced by it, first described the prophets' proclamation of God as pathetic theology. The prophets had no "idea" of God, but understood themselves and the people in the situation of God. Heschel called this situation of God the pathos of God. It has nothing to do with the irrational human emotions like desire, anger, anxiety, envy or sympathy, but describes the way in which God is affected by events and human actions and suffering in history. He is affected by them because he is interested in his creation, his people and his right. The pathos of God is intentional and transitive, not related to itself but to the history of the covenant people. God already emerged from himself at the creation of the world "in the beginning." In the covenant he enters into the world and the people of his choice. The "history" of God cannot therefore be separated from the history of his people. The history of the divine pathos is embedded in this history of men. . . .Abraham Heschel has developed his theology of the divine pathos as a dipolar theology. God is free in himself and at the same time interested in his covenant relationship and affected by human history. In this covenant relationship he has spoken of the pathos of God and the sympatheia of man, and in doing so has introduced a second bipolarity."Moltmann has considered the way in which classical Christian theology has asserted the apatheia of God. It has done so by acknowledging the suffering of the Son in which the Father does not participate. Moltmann has shown, against this propensity, that in Trinitarian thought the Father as well as the Son suffers:"To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms. The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The Fartherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son."Moltmann's statement is completely congruent, in the categories of Christian theology, with what Heschel had already discerned in Israel's prophets. The God of Christians, understood in the midst of God's revelation to ancient Israel, is a God deeply at risk in the drama of fidelity and infidelity in the world.
There is more there than I want to explicate (relax!). But some of it, the highlighted bits, are worth commentary in light of the lectionary texts for the day. All of those passages are important here; but it's the last sentence we'll focus on, because that is where the incarnation, the birth in the manger, takes place. In theological terms, that is.
We can say Mark's gospel (since it's the one that became canonical, and is the oldest in the canon) is where the idea of Isaiah and the prediction of Jesus of Nazareth were connected, and "prophecy" became "predictions of the future." At least for Christians. That's something Christians should unlearn, if only because God is in history, not guiding it mysteriously for purposes and plans we must take "on faith." I mean, try peddling that theology to a grieving mother who has just lost an infant child. Been there, but I didn't do that. "The bland assurances of a neutral God" fall apart rapidly in the face of reality.
Much better to go with the pathos of God, which is related to the history of the covenant people. As Paul would later explain, a full member of that covenant, in Jesus of Nazareth that relationship became universal. Then again, Isaiah's holy mountain was a vision of God's concern reaching to all people, as Paul also understood (but many Christians (not all!) do not).
To put "God deeply at risk in the drama of fidelity and infidelity in the world," start with John the Baptist.
He's an interesting figure in the gospels. There really aren't that many figures that occur in all four gospels. The disciples seem to acquire names as the gospels appear in time; and they acquire a more specific number. Mark comes from roughly 70 C.E.; Matthew is almost at the end of that century, alongside Luke (probably a decade later, or so; I'm going from memory here), and John around 120 C.E., so in the second decade of the new century (as we now count it). Across that span Pilate appears, and Herod; but Mary and Joseph only show up in Matthew and Luke. The unnamed woman who anoints Jesus in all four gospels only acquires a name (Mary) in John's gospel. Lazarus shows up in Luke in a parable; and as a real person in John. And so on and so on. But John the Baptist appears in all four gospels, serving the same role, living pretty much the same life (in Luke, John is a distant cousin of Jesus, through Mary, who is a cousin to Elizabeth, the Baptist's mother. Nobody else gives John this much of a family, or even parents). He's always in the "wilderness," that is, way outside of town/civilization, and people are always drawn out of town to go see him, and hear him. Mark gives us our first description of him, as a man who eats "locusts and wild honey." I'm assuming that by this time beekeeping was not unknown, and Mark's reference is to honey found in beehives in trees (for example. I have one in a tree in my front yard at the moment.). In other words, John lives on what God provides. He doesn't sew or reap (not that there's anything wrong with that!), he just takes what God gives so he can spend his time preaching and teaching.
If you begin to see a connection to monastic communities that make Benedictine or Trappist beer or otherwise sell goods to support their religious practices, it would be fair to say the Biblical link to Mark's version of John is one connection to what it, after all, a perfectly logical practice. They may do a bit more than John to produce goods for sale, but they also take what God provides and make good use of it. Not quite "God deeply at risk in the drama of fidelity and infidelity in the world," but certainly people seeing God in the world with them, in concrete if not necessarily dramatic ways.
Seeing God and being with God are two different things. God with us does not always mean we are with God. That statue representing John could just as well be Trito-Isaiah crying “Oh, that you would come down!” But it’s John trying to lift people up, trying to prepare people for what’s coming. Isaiah’s call has been answered; now we have to prepare for God present in our history again. “Oh, that you would rise up!”
Which is why the lectionary always gives us John the Baptizer early in Advent. Advent begins the church’s new year, a new beginning that reaches an early climax with the celebration 🎊 of the birth of the Christchild, and spends the next seven weeks reveling in that news before the six week preparation for the death of the Christ. But that’s another story for another season. Today we prepare the way of the Lord.
Isaiah’s message, by the way, the one Mark refers to, is to prepare the way by lowering every mountain and raising every valley so the glory of God can be seen by all. I was talking to my now adult daughter the other day about Xmases past, and she remembered (being an only child) family events where she was squeezed in a car between several adults. As in driving through Xmas light displays where she couldn’t see out the window. We always imagine great events where we will see the parade or the coronation or the blessing and nothing will impede our view. But the only sure way to do that is on a screen, with images transmitted through a camera. At a remove, in other words. Sometimes a far remove, and we only see what the camera shows us.
But in Isaiah’s vision there won’t be any bad seats or short people among tall crowds, nothing to block the view to which we are entitled. If, that is, we listen to the prophet, and prepare the way.
Are those mountains and valleys literal, or are they metaphors? Or both, and a little bit of neither? Is the pathos of God pity? Or is it care? Is it related back to God? Or to the covenant people? And wider now, to all people?
Prepare ye the way of the Lord! But which way is that?
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