The Isaiah Project: Chapter 63, or, Vengeance

Greetings. This chapter brings us up against a very difficult issue which we've wrestled with since the beginning. It's been my honor to contemplate these holy and fearsome mysteries with you, and I'm glad there have been multiple opportunities throughout this project to consider and re-consider them.

1. Who is this coming from Edom, his attire steeped in crimson from Bozrah? This traveler clothed in magnificence and trailed by the immensity of his might? It is I, proclaimer of righteousness, mighty to save.

2. Why these crimson clothes of yours, your garments like someone who tramps in a wine-vat?

3. I have treaded the winepress on my own; there was not one man with me out of all the peoples. I tread them in my rage and trample them down in my white-hot fury; their gore is spattered blood-red on my garments, and I am defiling all my clothing.

4. Because the day of revenge is in my heart, and my year of redemption has arrived.

5. I looked hard, but there was no one to help. I found myself appalled that there was no one to give support. But my own arm brought me salvation, and my white-hot rage was what gave me support.

6. I trampled down the peoples in my rage and made them drink down my white-hot fury, and shed their gore on the earth.

7. I will commemorate God’s mercies, and sing God’s praise, in keeping with the bounty God bestowed on us — the immensity of the goodness he bestowed on Israel’s household, in keeping with his heart’s compassion and the vastness of his mercies.

8. He said, ‘they are my people without question — sons of mine, who will not deceive.’ And he became their saviour.

9. In all their oppressions, he was oppressed. The angel of his presence saved them. In his love and his empathy, it was he who redeemed them: he lifted them up and he carried them, every day, forever.

10. But they provoked him bitterly, revolted against his sacred spirit. So he turned into their enemy, and it was he who waged war against them.

11. Then his people remembered days of antiquity — of Moses. Where is the one to lift them up from the ocean, with the ones who herd his sheep? Where is the one to place his sacred spirit deep within him?

12. The one to lead them, walking, by the right hand of Moses — the adornment of his arm? To cleave apart the water in front of them and so make an eternal name for himself?

13. The one to lead them, walking, through the deep depths — like a horse through the desert wasteland — so they never stumble?

14. As the cattle go down to the valley, God’s spirit brings them to rest. That’s how you guided your people, and so made a name to adorn yourself.

15. Peer out from heaven and see, from your sacred dwelling, adorned in beauty: where is your fierce desire and your heroic strength? The rumbling of your guts and your heart in compassion for me? Have they been tamped down?

16. You are our father: though Abraham never knew us, and we were strangers to Israel, you, God, are our father who redeems us. This name of yours is from eternity.

17. Why, God — why do you make us stagger off of your pathways? Why do you make our hearts grow hard against the fear of you? Come back, for your servants’ sake, for the tribes of your inheritance.

18. They have nearly driven out your sacred people: our oppressors trampled all over your sanctuary.

19. We’ve become like people over whom you never reigned from eternity, who were never called by your name.

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“And the angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes, and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath.” So wrote John of Patmos in his vision of the world’s end (Revelation 14:19). It’s one of those images from the Bible whose familiarity blunts its shock factor. The famous “grapes of wrath” are known from Steinbeck’s novel of that title, but at this point they are less a live metaphor than a catchphrase. We don’t reckon with the gory violence the language implies.

God crushes his enemies underfoot like grapes in a winepress, their innards squelching out of them like the innards of the fruit, their blood spattering his ankles and staining his clothes. Isaiah describes it here even more vividly than John does in Revelation: “their gore is spattered blood-red on my garments” (verse 3). “I...made them drink down my white-hot fury, and shed their gore on the earth” (verse 6). These are words to make a careful reader cringe.

The nation of Edom, with its capital city of Bozrah, had been archenemies of Israel since its origins. When Babylon exiled the Jews from Jerusalem (see verse 18), the Edomites were supposed to have chanted “tear it down, tear it down to its very foundations” (Psalm 137:7). So when the prophet imagines the Messiah coming from Edom soaked in blood, he’s looking forward to a time when God will bring holy payback to the enemies that mocked Jerusalem as it fell.

The Hebrew Bible is quite frank about the desire for divine retributive justice. This sits uncomfortably with moderns, who generally like to imagine a gentle and non-violent God. But if we are going to read Isaiah seriously as Scripture, we have to understand that the mercy and the retribution are not separable from one another. Here is God the reckoner and God the redeemer all in one, the light of whose merciful salvation is indistinguishable from the blinding fire of his rage at injustice. The regal crimson of his kingly cloak is one and the same as the gore which cakes his battledress.

Isaiah seamlessly blends this prophecy of doom with a recollection of Israel’s own faithlessness and punishment throughout its long history since Moses liberated the Jews from Egypt. Verses 9-10:

In all their oppressions, he was oppressed. The angel of his presence saved them. In his love and his empathy, it was he who redeemed them: he lifted them up and he carried them, every day, forever.

But they provoked him bitterly, revolted against his sacred spirit. So he turned into their enemy, and it was he who waged war against them.

So the Israelites could not have heard about the severity of God’s wrath against Edom without recalling that they, too, had incurred that wrath again and again. It was God’s favor alone that shielded them from the kind of annihilation which awaits their persecutors: they avoided the fate of Edom not because they are better, but because they are God’s.

The feeling of these passages is therefore not exactly one of vindictive relish, as we sometimes assume when we read them out of context. It is more like the feeling when you’re driving on the freeway and a car immediately behind you suffers a devastating accident. That happened to me once, and as I stared in shock at the fearsome tangle of burning metal in my rearview mirror, I found myself compulsively wondering what I had done right that saved me from the same fate. The answer was: nothing. I was spared the death that could have easily been mine. The mood of the Scripture which describes God’s wrath is like that, I think: it is the mood of a heart-stoppingly narrow miss.

We confuse ourselves morally when we start to ask who of our acquaintance will be in the car that crashes, and who will get to drive safely on down the road. Our angst about these passages, our survivor’s guilt, comes from envisioning those final days and trying to imagine what it will look like for some to be saved and others not. But if ever there were a question that was above our pay grade, it is this one: “the righteousness that is by faith says, ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?”...or “Who will descend into the deep?”’” writes Paul in Romans 10.

I find peace in God’s justice not because I can predict what it will look like, but because I cannot, and so I trust it to be better than mine. Whatever thing I think I would do were I in God’s position, however many lives I think I would spare because I am nicer than God, I am wrong. What he has in store is better and more just and more kind than I could hope to imagine. The God who led Israel by the hand of Moses does not change; the heart that forgave a broken woman caught in adultery is the same today and tomorrow and forever.

When he returns, he will be as he always was: inscrutable perhaps, but better and stronger and stranger and more tender than we could previously have thought or even brought ourselves to hope. When Paul finished his meditation on the subject, it was Isaiah whom he quoted: “anyone who believes in him will not be disappointed” (Romans 10:11; Isaiah 28:16). That, to paraphrase the poet Keats, is all we know on earth—and all we need to know.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer