First Thursday of Advent: 2022

You, O Lord, are father to us,

our Redeemer from of old is your name. 

O Lord, why do you make us err from your ways

and harden our heart, so that we fear you not?

Return for the sake of your servants,

the tribes of your heritage.

O that you would come rend the heavens and come down,

that the mountains might smoke at your presence--

as when the fire kindles brushwood

and the fire causes water to boil--

to make your name known to your adversaries,

and that the nations might tremble at your presence!

When you did terrible things which we looked not for,

you came down, the mountains quaked

at your presence.

From of old no one has heard

or perceived by the ear,

no eye has seen a God besides you.

You meet those who joyfully work righteousness,

those who remember you in your ways.

Behold, you were angry, and we sinned,

in our sin we have been a long time,

and shall we be saved?

We have all become like one who is unclean,

and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.

We all fade like a leaf,

and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

There is no one that calls upon your name,

who arises to take hold of you;

for you have hid your face from us,

and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquities.

Yet, O Lord, you are father to us;

we are the clay, and you are our potter;

we are all the works of your hand.

Be not exceedingly angry, O Lord,

and remember not our iniquity forever.

(I can't post scripture without putting in a word about it.  Scripture is not God speaking directly, like a newspaper trying to report the news of events.  It is the expression of a community, a dialogue between God and humanity, and how we interpret it is how we benefit, or don't, from it.  After all, we all have opinions about Moby Dick, but who has a first-hand opinion about Melville's novel?  Just so, no one has a first-hand opinion about scripture.  Let me suggest an exegesis.)

This is Trito, or third, Isaiah; deep in the exile, weary of the loss of Jerusalem and Israel/Judea, well aware that what happened is the "sin" of the people, that the "wrath of God" came from them as much as from God; that this is a relationship between God and the children of Abraham.  Keep that in mind, and it begins to make sense.

But it also means God is not human, not even super-human; and the ways of God are not the ways of the people of Israel.  But they should be; from Israel's end, not God's.  So the prophets longs for a show of strength from God, as when Ezekiel called upon God to burn the wood offered to Baal, wood soaked in water that nevertheless produced a holocaust (a reversal, you see) to show God's power where Baal was merely a false idol. A show of strength to give the people hope, to sustain their hearts.

"Sin" is a too-powerful word today.  It means too much.  Israel's sin is not the sin of Calvin that damns all but the "elect" to hell for eternity.  Isaiah does not envision the "sinners in the hands of an angry God" of Jonathan Edwards. Take it as the cost of Israel's unfaithfulness, the consequence of its foolishness.  And look at all that is required of them: righteousness.  No more than that: righteousness.  Not adherence to dietary laws or keeping the Sabbath (although that is, for the people of the covenant, part of righteousness), but how they lived and treated others, and what goal (telos, to allow Aristotle into the argument), they sought. A benefit for themselves, individually; or a benefit for their brothers and sisters, for the other children of Abraham, as well as the strangers and foreigners among them.

The prophet moves back and forth, powerfully and emotionally, from pleading with God to confessing to God to reminding God Israel is not past redemption, that Israel can be saved.  That last image, the potter and the clay, is so perfect a metaphor for humility and transformation it was one of the beloved hymns of my childhood.  The prophet speaks to God for the people here, and humbly offers the nation back to God if God will accept them, and save them.

Though the Lord has established the signs of the coming, the time of their fulfillment has not been plainly revealed.  These signs have come and gone with a multiplicity of change; more than that, they are still present.  The second coming is like the first.

--Ephrem, Fourth Century

Ecce Rex veniet Dominus terrae,

et ipse afferent captivitatis nostrae.

See! The ruler of the earth shall come,

the Lord who will take from us the heavy burden of our exile.

--Monastic liturgy