The Isaiah Project: Chapter 55, or, The Facts

Hi folks,

A big chapter at a momentous time. enjoy.

1. Who could believe what they heard from us? The arm of God . . . for whom is it uncovered?

2. He arose before him like a sapling, like a root from parched ground — he cuts no fine figure, has no elegance for us to love or good looks for us to look at.

3. He was despised — the reject of mankind, a man of agony who knew affliction well. The kind of man to make men hide their faces from him: he was despised. We didn’t give him a second thought.

4. Oh, but it was our affliction he took upon himself, and our agony he bore. And yet we thought he was being punished — beaten and abased by our god.

5. He was the one to be maimed for our rebellion and crushed for our corruptions. The harsh correction of our peace fell upon him, and in his lesions we find healing.

6. All of us wandered like sheep, each turning down his own path. But God put the corruption of us all on him.

7. He was brought low. He was the one abased, and he never opened his mouth. He was carried like a lamb in solemn procession to the sacrifice — but as a sheep keeps quiet when they shear it, he never opened his mouth.

8. Out of confinement, out of justice, he was taken. Who will mention his legacy? He was ripped out of the land of the living; for the rebellion of my people to whom the blow was due.

9. They gave him a grave with the wicked, but with the wealthy in his death — because he never committed any injury; no deceit was in his mouth.

10. But God’s pleasure was to beat him down with disease — when his soul is laid down as atonement for sin, he will see his legacy. He will stretch out his days, and God’s pleasure will come to fruition at his hand.

11. When he sees what his soul toiled over, he’ll be satisfied. With his knowledge, my righteous servant will make great crowds of people righteous — he will be the one to bear the burden of their corruptions.

12. And so I’ll set aside a share for him among the great. He’ll take a share of the loot with the conquerors, because he poured his naked soul out into death and was counted among the rebels — he was the one to bear the sins of those great crowds of people and step in on behalf of the rebels.

What a mess we are.

I am finding it very easy to believe that these days. Some days it's hard. The psalmist sings: 'in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved' (Psalm 30:6). And so help me, that's how it is. I know we live in a fallen world, but still: when things are going well, in my heart I hope it can go on forever.

It ought to. I feel that in my heart, too: the good things of the world are so good, and so simple. Why we can't hang on to them? Go to work, fall in love, eat what you earn, look at the sky: these raw elements of human experience are, in essence, good. When we do them, and they go well, sometimes I think we can catch a glimpse of God's intended creation, self-sustaining and perfectly balanced. It only seems basic because it is so essential, the way the world works. We only don't relish it because it is everywhere. We only forget how good it is because it is so good.

But: 'you hid your face, and I was troubled' (Psalm 30:7). The next line of the psalm, perfect because it offers no explanation. The way things should work is not the way they do, and the impossibility of accounting for that is the bitterest part of the pain. Food is scarce, we grow old and break down, the basic rules of our life together are broken, broken. Worse than all this is the part of it--the big part of it--for which we are responsible. It is awful when our world crumbles around us. But it's agony when we ourselves have a hand in making it so.

That's where we are, I think, at the moment. Violence in the streets, bitter recrimination among people everywhere I look, friends and families driven apart. This website is not the place--has never been the place--for me to start a fight about who got us here that would last forever and solve nothing. In this essay I'm making one point only: we got us here, and we cannot get ourselves out of this mess without help.

Isaiah placed the blame for the exile in Babylon squarely on the faithlessness of Israel and Jerusalem. He looked around as I am doing now and said: it's us. It's our decadent way of life, our refusal to do justly or show mercy, that left us vulnerable to the predations of a hungry world. He did not exempt himself: 'I am dismantled, I, a man of filthy lips within a filthy-lipped nation,' he said upon his first vision of God (Isaiah 6:5). He was born into a city and a people that were favored of God, that had everything needed to live and rejoice. He looked around and saw, with bitter disapointment: it was not so.

All that heartsickness can be found in this chapter, painfully and grimly expressed. "All of us wandered like sheep, each turning down his own path" (verse 6). But Isaiah was a prophet, and he saw more than the failure of Israel. He saw a man in the midst of it, someone no one expected: 'we didn't give him a second thought' (verse 3). This is perhaps the most famous of all Isaiah's 'suffering servant' songs, the story of God's anointed and his choice to be wounded on our behalf. 'He was despised--the reject of mankind, a man of agony' (verse 3). 'He was carried like a lamb in solemn procession to the sacrifice' (verse 7). 'He will be the one to bear the burden' that we brought upon ourselves and can no longer carry (verse 11).

I don't have anything more profound to say about these words than that they are true. I don't have a 'why' to offer. No ingenious explanation of what led God to take us on--sorry, sordid mess that we are. There is no why. There is love, and that's it. The question that Christ asked on the cross--"my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"--is the most unanswerable question in the world, except for one. The other unanswerable question--the one that hardly makes sense to ask--is why Christ chose to mount the cross on the first place.

There is no reason, in other words, why our world should be as broken as it is. There is only the fact of our sin. And there is no reason, either, why God should have suffered to save us. There is only the fact of his love. If the first of these facts is overwhelming you, as it has threatened to overwhelm me these past few months, do not ask why it should be so. That way madness lies. Ask instead whether God might grant you a knowledge also of that second fact, the final and immutable fact: that under the lash which you suffer, in the grief of your disappointment, in the worst of the world, there he is. It is so. It is enough.