Dec. 9 "Behold, I am bringing you good news of great joy"

Friday, December 9 | Isaiah 1:1-6

From the very start Isaiah launches an all-out arraignment against Israel. He declares that the people do not know God. Many readers will recall the words of John 1.10, 11: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” In a similar vein, poet Alan of Lille wrote of human alienation from Nature: “Why do you force the knowledge of me to leave your memory and go abroad, you in whom my gifts proclaim me who have blessed you with the right bounteous gifts of so many favours; who, acting by an established covenant as the deputy of God, the creator, have from your earliest years established the appointed course of your life?”

Emphasizing the ignorance and rebellion of the people, the prophet notes that dumb animals know who is their master, but this people have no such knowledge. This comparison reminds me of a line from Erasmus’s treatise on preaching, published late in his life: “If elephants can be trained to dance, lions to play, and leopards to hunt, surely priests can be taught to preach.”

The thoroughness of Isaiah’s indictment is troubling: the lack of knowledge, the corruption, and the punishment extend from the sole of the foot to the head. In the 1960s I was a pastor in the inner city of Philadelphia. The church’s neighborhood was one third Black, one third Puerto Rican, and one third German. Today that neighborhood is all crack houses and is uninhabitable. For me this image symbolizes our deepening cultural and spiritual decline and alienation. Perhaps this exaggerates, but if so it is an exaggeration in the direction of the truth. How fitting Austin Seminary’s President Ted Wardlaw’s last charge to graduates implored them to just “tell the truth.”

Given human abandonment of the divine, just how is it that the LORD continues to speak? The Holy does not cease to communicate with what is unholy! Can this mean that God has not given up on us? Our alienation does not change the caring nature of God. Can we hear both the prophetic indictment and the good news of the gospel? The Holy Word has become flesh and dwells among us, and has made God known again (John 1.18). In the midst of all of today’s woes and wrongs, by God’s grace and truth, may all of us envision, know, and live into the reality of this “good news of great joy.”

– Rev. Dr. Ralph L. Underwood Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Care