The Isaiah Project: Chapter 52, or, Wake Up

Greetings--a slightly shorter chapter than we've had recently, with an essay below as usual. Enjoy!

1. Wake up. Wake up, and clothe yourself in might, Zion. Clothe yourself in elegant garments, Jerusalem, holy city — the uncircumcised and the defiled will never come into you again.

2. Shake the dust off of yourself; rise, sit — Jerusalem! Undo the bonds around your neck, captive daughter of Zion.

3. Because so says God: ‘you were sold for nothing; you will be redeemed without silver.

4. Because so says God, my Master: ‘my people went down to Egypt back at the beginning, to settle there. Assyria abused them over nothing.

5. Now then — what do I have here, declares God. My people, taken away for nothing? Their rulers howl, declares God, and relentlessly, every day, my name is defiled.

6. And so: my people will know my name. And so: On That Day they’ll know that I am he, the one proclaiming, ‘here I am.’

7. How beautiful: on the mountains, the feet of the one who brings good news, who brings word of peace, who brings the best of news, who brings word of salvation, who says to Zion, ‘your god is king.’

8. The voice of the ones who watch for you . . . they lift up their voice! They’ll shout in unison triumph — when God comes back to Zion, they will see eye to eye.

9. Break out into hymns of triumph in unison! Dry deserts of Jerusalem: God has consoled his people; God who redeems Jerusalem.

10. God has laid his sacred arm bare before the eyes of the nations. And all the far reaches of Earth see the salvation of our god.

11. Get out! Get gone, get out of there; don’t touch anything defiled. Get out from within her; get pure, you who carry the vessels of God.

12. But you won’t escape in a hurry, or go out in a rush, because of God who goes before you. The god of Israel will be your reward.

13. Look: my servant will be victorious. He will be on high, lifted up, immensely exalted.

14. Just as many masses were appalled at you — his appearance so disfigured; more than any man, more than all the sons of the soil —

15. So he will startle many nations. Kings will clamp their mouths shut at him: they’ll see what was never spelled out for them, and contemplate what they never heard.

-- -- --

I don't know about you, but I am utterly starved for good news.

It has been a year so grueling that just saying its name has become a standin for everything going wrong. Rather than litigate how bad 2020 actually is, and how it stacks up against the ancient Jewish experience in Babylon (hint: the Babylonian exile was worse), it seems more useful to say simply that at the very least, this year has been kind of a slog.

One thing I've noticed about my experience is that waking up every day to more outlandishly bad news has a cumulative effect on a person's psychology. We've now been trained, most of us, to wince as we open the morning paper or its digital equivalent. What's really demoralizing about it is, you forget sometimes that it wasn't always this way and won't be forever.

One can only imagine how much more profound this kind of inertia gets for people suffering true oppression -- as the Jews were in Babylon, and as Jews and Christians are even now around the world. It's more than just any one discomfort: it's the fact that after a while, the human heart simply forgets to hope.

The first verse of this chapter is for people ground under the heel of such relentless pain -- for Jews in Babylon, for Christians in fear of execution, for mothers in grief over miscarriage. To such people Isaiah says: wake up. Wake up from the fog of despair, from the pitch black of the dark night, and hear me when I say that there is such a thing as dawn.

This sounds nice until you imagine someone saying it to you at your lowest point. Because the funny thing about despair is that we can become wedded to it, protective of it, hostile towards anyone who tries to dispel it. It's a defense mechanism, I suspect: there is so much false and naïve hope out there, presented breezily and even callously by people who don't seem to understand what real suffering is. People who tell you things will go well if you just pray harder, or eat better, or take up yoga. Accepting that kind of hope is a recipe for disappointment, and being offered it can feel like a slap in the face. How can you simply 'wake up' from the experience of losing a child or receiving a terminal diagnosis? What consolation could possibly be big enough to justify such a thought?

Only one. Verse 10: 'God has laid his sacred arm bare before the eyes of the nations. And all the far reaches of Earth see the salvation of our god.' Isaiah knows how improbable this seems to his audience. It is something of which even kings have 'never heard' before (verse 15). The prophet brings words of God unveiled and earth upended because he knows as well as anyone how scarce good news is, and how good it has to be to really count.

Here's the weirdly comforting thing: you don't even actually have to feel good about Isaiah's claims for them to be true. Maybe at this point, when he says 'wake up,' you'd like to roll over in bed and deck him the jaw before hitting the snooze button. And yet just as sure as 2020 will end, the things Isaiah prophesies in this chapter will come to pass. The very son of God, exalted on high and abounding in mercy, will return to Zion, and you, even you, will be glad again. 'How beautiful: on the mountains, the feet of one who brings good news' -- who is already sprinting to your side before you even have the strength to ask. No exile is forever. Don't be fooled into thinking that your grief won't end.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer