The Isaiah Project: Chapter 56, or, Foreigners' Sons
As always, it's my pleasure to bring you another chapter. The reflection below it may be some comfort, I hope, in our fractious times.
1. So says God: keep watch over justice and do what is righteous, because of how close my salvation is to coming, and my righteousness to being unveiled.
2. Blessing for a man, for the soil’s son, is doing this and clinging to it: keeping the sabbath from defilement and keeping back his hand from doing any evil.
3. And let no foreigner’s son who cleaves to God say, ‘God excludes; he will exclude me from his people.’ And let no eunuch say, ‘look — I am a withered tree.’
4. Because so says God to eunuchs who keep the sabbath, and choose what pleases me, and cling to my covenant:
5. ‘In my house, within my walls, I give them a memorial and a name, better than that of sons or of daughters: I will give them an eternal name, which will not be cut down.
6. ‘And as for the foreigners’ sons, who cleave to God, to be his ministers and love God’s name, to be servants for him — everyone who keeps the sabbath from defilement and clings to my covenant —
7. I will have them come to my sacred mountain and rejoice in my house of prayer. Their offerings and sacrifices will be graciously accepted at my sacrificial altar, because my house will be called a house of prayer for every nation.
8. God, my Master, who gathers up Israel’s outcasts, declares: ‘I will gather still more to those already gathered around him.
9. Every living thing in the field: come eat. Every living thing in the forest thicket.
10. The ones who watch for him are blind, all of them — they don’t know, they’re mute dogs, every one of them. They can’t bark; they love sleeping; they dream and they doze —
11. Greedy dogs, who don’t know when they’ve had enough. And they’re shepherds who have no way to understand, all of them turning down his own path, every man with his own prize off in his own corner.
12. Come. I’ll get some wine, and we’ll fill up on liquor, and tomorrow will be a day just like this, except richer still.
In 1932, the great apologist G.K. Chesterton visited Dublin for the Eucharistic Congress--a grand ceremonial gathering of the worldwide Catholic church. Representatives came from as far afield as India and Africa to crowd the streets with color and fanfare. Ireland was barely ten years out of its own bloody civil war; Europe as a whole was weary from the first world war and lurching miserably toward the second. It seemed little short of miraculous to Chesterton that in a world so violently splintered by inter- and intranational aggression, men from every nation might gather to take Communion. And yet here was Christendom in Dublin, a parade of the whole world in microcosm:
A German priest may have something to say against Poland; a Polish priest most certainly has something to say against Germany. And as each has something to say, it is possible that on proper occasion he may say something. But he will not say anything, in the sense of everything and nothing; the one will not say anything that comes into his head against Germany nor the other against Poland. The German priest will not say, “We are going to make war on Poland, for, as our great German sage has said, a good war justifies any cause.” The Polish priest will not say, “Nationalism is more important than Catholicism; and if I can exalt the Polish nation, I don't care if all German Catholics go to hell.”
What's remarkable about Chesterton's account is that he insists none of the various citizens lost one ounce of his national identity or individualism. He simply observes that in that moment, at least, the fact of sharing Christ created a universal backdrop against which all the many differences shone out. These embattled Christians met one another not by eliding their differences or melting their identities down, but by sharing in the wonderous, improbable fact that God's unmerited favor unto them could withstand and bridge even the divisions that would one day amount to world war.
This is a kind of global harmony far different from the borderless visions of peace and unity about which we fantasize today. God's united church is noisier, stranger, and more poignant than the sterile utopia for which our futurists yearn. We learn the power of divine love to heal not by pretending that our wounds aren't there, but by acknowledging that they are there, and they are deep. The witness of the church is to see how utter our division can be and say "yes: this, even this cacophany of noise, will be made to harmonize in every note by the king whom all shall serve." Harmony, after all, is not the blending of sounds together into unison, but the arrangement of recognizably different notes in productive tension and powerful concert.
In Chapter 56, Isaiah proclaims that this kind of harmony will be achieved across all the world--not just in Dublin--when the Messiah calls his faithful back to Mount Zion. God "gathers up Israel's outcasts" from their exile in Babylon, but then declares: "'I will gather still more'" (verse 8). The "foreigner's sons" will be united not because they transform magically into Israelites, but because they share a devotion to God with Israel's faithful--because that devotion withstands and brings into harmony every kind of difference. It was no less daring for Isaiah to preach this to the Jews--who were under constant threat of annihilation and understandibly fearful of foreign invasion--than it was for Chesterton to say it about Poles and Germans.
What makes this more than mere kumbaya is the sheer madness of it in the here and now: as they are presently, our blood feuds and our national disputes do not present the romanticized picture of "global diversity" that we would like to believe in. We are at each other's throats. But as the context in which prophecy may be uttered, our present dysfunction spurs the imagination to mysteries which eye has not seen nor ear heard: how powerful in his mercy must be a God who can make of these fractious peoples one church, one kingdom. Though we wait now in the valley of death for his revelation, still Isaiah insists that when at last he comes we will flock to him, and be at peace.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer