The Isaiah Project: Chapter 49, or, The Memory of Pain
Hello again--it's my pleasure to bring you another chapter, with the relevant essay below as usual. Enjoy!
The Vision Isaiah Saw: Chapter 491. Listen, islands. Pay attention, nations from far away: God called me from the womb. From my mother’s insides he recalled my name.
2. He made my mouth like a sword: sharp. In the shadow of his hand he concealed me, and made me as an arrow — whetted, in his quiver he hid me.
3. And he said to me, ‘you, my servant, Israel — in you I will adorn myself.’
4. But me, I said, ‘I’ve exhausted myself for nothing; For emptiness and air I spent my strength. For sure, my judgment is with my master; my wages with my God.’
5. And now God says — The one who molded me out of the womb as a servant for him, to turn Jacob back to him, and Israel; to gather them for him (and I am given majesty in God’s eyes, and my god is my might)
6. He says, ‘It’s too trifling for you to be my servant to establish the tribes of Jacob and bring back the children of Israel: I will give you as a light to the foreign nations, so that my salvation can come into being at the outermost ends of the world.
7. So says God, Israel’s Sacred One, who redeems it, to the one despised to his core, to the reject of nations, to the slave of rulers: ‘kings will see, and they’ll stand. Princes will fall on their faces — because of God, who can be trusted: Israel’s sacred one, and he chooses you.
8. So says God: ‘in a moment of favor I answered you, and on salvation’s day I helped you. I’ll store you up and give you away as a covenant to the people, to secure the world, to make them inherit the desolate inheritance.
9. To say to the captives, ‘come out’; to the people in pitch dark, ‘be revealed.’ On the paths they will be fed, and on the deserted peaks there will be pasture.
10. They will not go hungry and they will feel no thirst; no sweltering heat, no sun will beat down on them. He who has mercy on them will show the way, and lead them to wellsprings of water.
11. And I will turn all my mountains into a path, and I will lift my thoroughfares up on high.
12. Look at these who come from far away. Look at these from the distant North and from the Western ocean, and these from Sinim’s territory.
13. Sing in triumph, you heavens; celebrate, earth, and mountains — burst into triumph hymns: God consoled his people and opened his heart in mercy to the impoverished.
14. Zion said, ‘God has deserted me. My Master forgot about me.’
15. Does a woman forget the baby from the tenderness of her womb? The son from her bosom? Even they could forget: I won’t forget you.
16. Look: I’ve carved you into the flesh of my hands. Your walls stand forever in my sight.
17. Your sons have rushed to you. Your attackers, your destroyers flee.
18. Lift up your eyes and look around you; see: they’re all assembled; they have come to you; as I live, declares God, you’ll adorn yourself with all of them like jewelry, bind them to yourself the way a new bride does:
19. Your dried-up deserts and your wastelands, your territory, ravaged, yes: now they’ll be stuffed full of settlers, and the ones who devoured you will be far away.
20. They’ll whisper in your ears yet, the children of your grief and loss: ‘this place is too cramped for me — make more room for me to settle in!’
21. And you’ll say, in your heart: ‘who gave me these children? When I was filled with grief, barren and tossed aside? These — who made them grow? Look: I was abandoned, all alone. How are they here?’
22. So says God, my Master: look. I am raising my hand for the foreigners, for the nations. I am lifting my flag on high, and they’re bringing your sons, enfolded in their arms, and your daughters, carried on their shoulders.
23. Then kings take care of you, and noblewomen become your nursemaids — they’ll prostrate themselves before you with their nose to the earth; they’ll lick the dust at your feet, and you’ll know that I am God. No one who puts their high hopes in me will be put to shame.
24. When the war hero takes a prize, does it get taken back? Do captives get carried away?
25. But so says God: ‘even the war hero’s captive is taken, and the prize that the brutal fighters take will be carried away. I will prosecute your prosecutors and save your sons.
26. I’ll make the ones who abuse you eat their own flesh. They’ll get drunk on their own blood as if it were muscatel, and they’ll know — all flesh will — that I am god who saves you, who redeems you: Jacob’s juggernaut.
'Does a woman forget the baby from the tenderness of her womb? The son from her bosom? Even they could forget: I won't forget you' (verse 15).
These are some of Isaiah's most famous words. In one sense, their sentiment long predates Isaiah himself: the Hebrew Bible insists everywhere that God remembers every part of us, from conception onward and even after death. 'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,' said God to the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:5). 'You created my innermost being,' sang the psalmist to God: 'you knit me together in my mother's womb' (Psalm 139:13).
But then comes a wrenching realization, a quite shocking variation on the traditional Jewish teaching: God does not forget, but people do. We have to. We can't possibly go through all of life feeling the full anguish of what death is. True, no grieving mother ever fully leaves behind the loss of a child. But we all have to let time soften the intensity of the first pain. We have to forget, or else let our wounds be ripped open again and again.
Then Isaiah says: God chooses to be wounded ceaselessly rather than forget a single inch of us. If this assertion were not so familiar, it would be staggering. No matter how awfully we are ripped from this fallen world--even if we are torn dead from the womb or murdered by foreign soldiers--God will not 'get over us.' He will not let time erode the intensity of his longing for us, the passion of his mourning for our loss.
So it is that God says he has us 'carved into the flesh of my hands'--Christians cannot help but see in this line the pierced hands of Christ on the cross. We cannot help but realize once again the infinite depths of what those hands mean. All the pain that we feel at losing one another, every sob of desolation that has ever been cried over a departed lover or a buried father, pulses with raw pain at the heart of our wounded God. His pain is not softened by time or forgetfulness as ours is.
Which is why, says Isaiah, God cannot simply abandon us to our own perdition. Instead the ferocity of his pain--of our pain, infinitely compounded and searingly remembered, honored in the Godhead for all eternity in ways we cannot bear to imagine--will drive him to rescue every last one of us, until every grieving mother is astounded at the return from death of her innumerable lost descendants (verse 21). There is nothing our God, in his grief over us, will not do to make us whole.
The English poet T.S. Eliot imagined Christ healing our injuries with hands still bleeding from his own crucifixion ('East Coker' IV). I think Isaiah saw something similar: a God who feels and remembers our pain more deeply than we can even bear to ourselves. Such a God cannot stand--will not stand--for us to remain dead.
Rejoice evermore,Spencer