This weekend was the Calvin Oratorio Society’s 104th annual performance of Handel’s Messiah, and Rebekah was in the orchestra on violin. I took off work a little early, Sara and the kids picked me up on the way, and up we went to Grand Rapids. Rebekah was feeling lousy—she figured it for a case of food poisoning—but God sustained her through the afternoon, and she played through the concert without a hitch. It was a joy and a blessing to be able to be there, both for her and for the music. I’ve heard the Messiah I don’t know how many times and sung a number of the choruses in choir, but this was the first performance I’ve ever attended.
If you’re familiar with the work, you know the text is a montage of Scripture passages, beginning with Isaiah 40:1-5; the opening command, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,” filled the auditorium literally and spiritually. As it should, for it introduces an extraordinary promise of extraordinary deliverance. I don’t want to get too far into this, given that Isaiah 40 is a passage for next week, not this week, but that promise also introduces a puzzle which has challenged Jews and Christians at least as far back as the twelfth-century rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra. Isaiah was a prophet in the southern kingdom of Judah in the eighth century BC, during the period in which the Assyrian Empire obliterated the northern kingdom of Israel and nearly conquered Judah. Isaiah 40-55, however, are clearly addressed to the people of God in the sixth century BC, after Judah has fallen to the Babylonians—which might not be a problem, except it seems equally clearly to be addressed from the sixth century BC as well. The exile is not prophesied as a future consequence of Judah’s unfaithfulness, it’s the starting point for the deliverance which is prophesied as an expression of God’s faithfulness. What do we do with that?
As far back as Rabbi ibn Ezra, many have answered that question in the simplest way possible: Isaiah 40-55 (and maybe 56-66 as well) don’t come from the eighth-century prophet, they were written in the sixth century BC (or even later) by someone else. Thing is, when we “solve” biblical difficulties by chopping up Scripture, I think most of the time we oversimplify ourselves out of a lot of meaning in the text. I believe that’s definitely the case with Isaiah 40—and if you’re wondering why I’m spending time talking about next week’s Scripture, it’s because this bears on how we understand Isaiah 64 and Psalm 80.
You see, in the ancient world, the identification of peoples with their national deities was total. You might even say they understood nations as proxies for their gods. When two nations fought, it wasn’t just a battle on Earth, it was a war in the heavens; if one conquered another, it meant that nation’s deities had proven themselves the stronger; and as a consequence, when a nation was conquered, it disappeared from history and took its gods with it. By all the rules the sixth century BC knew, the Hebrew people should have done the same.
The Babylonian conquest, then, was an existential and theological crisis for the people of God. Everything God had given them, everything he had promised, had been stripped away and claimed as the spoils of war by the gods of another nation. It would not be enough to say that God had told them through his prophets that exactly this would happen; that could easily be nothing more than God making excuses in advance for his eventual defeat. The people of Israel and Judah needed sufficient reason to keep the faith—or, really, to have faith in God in a meaningful way. If we understand Isaiah 40-55 as a prophetic narrative for the sixth century BC given in the eighth century BC to the prophet Isaiah, I believe we can see it as the sort of anchor for their faith which the sixth-century exiles desperately needed: the assurance that their God had not been defeated, and that he would prove this to be true by sustaining them through the exile and then bringing them back to the land he had given them.
This matters in understanding our passages this morning because while the crisis reached its apex with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, it began with the eighth-century Assyrian conquest of the north, and this is the context of our passages this morning. The psalm names its author as Asaph—not the original, who was worship leader and choir director in Jerusalem during the reign of King David, but presumably his successor in that role in the Temple. As such, he would have faced the same challenge I remember facing on September 11, 2001: how do you lead the people of God in worshiping him in the face of national calamity? Psalm 80 is, I believe, part of his answer to that challenge. Isaiah faced the parallel challenge, as God’s prophet, of speaking for God to his people as God was allowing the Assyrians to seize half his people and the land he had given them, and nearly wipe the southern kingdom off the map along with them. Chapters 36-37 show the public face of that reality as Isaiah worked with King Hezekiah to hold Judah together in the face of the Assyrian threat; I believe chapter 64 shows us part of Isaiah’s personal response to God in that time.
These are our texts for this first Sunday of Advent, which is the Sunday of hope; they are exercises in seeking hope in God in times which do not inspire hope. Given that, it’s no surprise that Psalm 80 draws significantly on a couple earlier texts which were important to Israel—which are also texts we know well, so you might have caught the allusions. I’ll get to the second one in a few minutes when we consider the poem’s refrain, but the first one is right there in verse 1: “Please listen, O Shepherd of Israel!” This psalm is shaped by the language and imagery of Psalm 23. That psalm is more individual in its focus than this one, but since the individual who wrote it was the king of Israel, the line between the individual and the nation is more than a little blurred. The king is responsible (with the priests) to shepherd Israel; God is the king’s shepherd; thus God is Israel’s true shepherd, with king and priests as his earthly stewards.
Of course, that only matters if God has the power to care for his people; sheep are short-sighted and even shorter-witted. This is why Psalm 80 links its shepherding language with a theme which is also key in Isaiah 64—and for VSF: God is bigger than our imagination. The Shepherd of Israel is also the God of Angel Armies, capable of tearing the sky apart and setting the mountains shaking like Jell-O. This means that, yes, he has the power to do whatever needs to be done to nurture, protect, and deliver his people—and also to judge and discipline them for their persistent stiff-necked, hard-hearted rebellion against his shepherding.
At the same time, God is also big enough to show mercy, to deliver his people from his judgment on them, and it’s for this that both the psalmist and the prophet cry out. It’s important to recognize that neither makes any effort to plead Israel’s case. Neither argues that Israel has any claim on God’s mercy, or offering mitigating factors, as if they were lawyers trying to get the sentence reduced on appeal. Rather, though they don’t use the exact language of Psalm 23, both ask God to have mercy on his people for his name’s sake—for the sake of his reputation, so that people will see and know him truly and give him the praise and worship which are rightly his due, and for the sake of his character, because he is a God of love and mercy and faithfulness,
The psalmist begins his appeal by asking God to act to show his power and his character to his own people—which shouldn’t be necessary, given how many times and in how many ways he has acted to deliver them in the past; and yet it is. Not only has Israel’s chronically-recurrent rebellion showed that his reputation among his people was not what it should have been, we’ve already seen that the conquest and exile of the northern tribes at the hands of the Assyrians (and their near-conquest of the southern kingdom) has called his reputation into question. Isaiah and Asaph stare at this reality in dismay. Isaiah notes it as a reason why God’s people don’t worship him; the psalmist cries out to God to do something about it.
The question of God’s reputation among his people is closely paralleled by that of his reputation among the nations—and if the destruction of the northern kingdom is enough to make God’s own people doubt him, you know what the nations around them are saying, especially the Assyrians. The psalmist raises this concern in verse 7, lamenting, “Our enemies treat us as a joke.” Isaiah 64 begins with a plea for God to terrify the nations by showing up in his unveiled glory—the glory he had told Moses no human being could see and survive. Both ask God to relent and deliver his people from their disaster so the nations will see him as he truly is.
Going deeper, God’s name isn’t just about his reputation, it’s also about his honor. To borrow a line from one of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, reputation is what others know about you, while honor is what you know about yourself, and this too is part of the appeal Asaph and Isaiah make to God: they call on him to rescue his people from their sin to be true to himself and his character. After all, this is the people he chose and created for himself, and he has promises to keep—promises he made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to Moses, and to David. When he looks down and sees their utter desolation, how can he not be moved to compassion?
As we can see, prophet and psalmist share a common understanding of God, but they have more than that in common: their cries to him for deliverance are defined by the same three key characteristics. As it happens, these are three “H” words, so I feel happily accomplished this morning for having achieved alliteration. The first is honesty: they are committed to telling the truth about their people’s sin, admitting that the Assyria-shaped devastation which has come upon them is something they richly deserve for their faithlessness. We find no excuses, defenses, or justifications offered in our passages this morning, only admission of guilt and responsibility. Isaiah 64 is explicit in its confession—“We continued to sin against [your ways] . . . All of us have become unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags . . . like the wind our sins sweep us away.” Psalm 80 is less direct on this point, but verse 18 acknowledges Israel’s pattern of turning away from God.
The second common characteristic is humility: neither Asaph nor Isaiah claims that if God will just forgive his people one more time, then this time they’ll do things right. Neither has any illusion that Israel would or even could keep such a promise if they made it. Rather, both confess that the only way God’s people will ever faithfully remember his ways and keep his commandments is if he makes that happen. The way Psalm 80 expresses that, we’ll get to in a minute. Isaiah 64 gives us the vivid image of verse 8: “We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”
The third characteristic is hope, but not in a generic way; it’s the hope we see articulated in the refrain of Psalm 80, which occurs in verses 3, 7, and 19, getting a little longer each time. Like the psalm’s first verse, the refrain picks up the language of Psalm 23. Its first phrase, which is typically translated “Restore us, O God,” uses the same word as Psalm 23:3, which the King James Version famously translated “He restores my soul.” The Hebrew word is shuv, which most basically means “turn,” and which is the standard word used for the act of repentance. In the text of Psalm 23 we used as the call to worship when I spoke back in October, I translated the first part of verse 3 as “He brings me back when I stray,” because the image there is of a sheep which has gotten lost and needs to be rescued and returned to the good path. Psalm 80 draws on that language and that image to express the conviction that even our repentance must come to us as God’s good gift; if Israel is to return to God, it can only be because God has turned their hearts around and brought them back to himself.
Interestingly, though, the psalmist realizes that more even than that is needed, and so the refrain also gives us the second major scriptural allusion I mentioned earlier: to the priestly blessing from Numbers 6, which we speak over each other almost every Sunday. Not content only to ask God to turn his people around, Asaph pleads, “Make your face shine.” I deeply love the observation Beth Tanner, who teaches Old Testament at New Brunswick, offers here: “The people’s turning is not enough for restored relationship; God must show up and show favor again for the relationship to be restored. The people must confess, and God must forgive.” God must turn our hearts, and then he must show up to meet us. In that is our hope.
With respect to worship, I believe we see in our passages this morning that we can worship in the darkness. Lament, even bitter lament, can be worship if it’s directed to God. If you were here a few years ago when I spoke on Job 42, you may remember we saw this point in 42:7; over the course of the book, Job hurls increasingly furious, intemperate accusations at God, but God commends him by comparison to his friends because he’s talking to God while they just talk about God. Psalm 80 isn’t completely flattering in its description of God either; though our English translations obscure the imagery, verse 2 implicitly accuses God of being asleep, calling on him to wake up and come save his people. Strange as it may seem, even accusing God of being asleep can be worship—as long as we’re talking to him about it rather than talking to others about him. As Margaret Becker put it in one of her songs, God’s not afraid of your honesty.
The bottom line here is that we can worship God even when we’re absolutely certain we have no right even to darken his door. We don’t have to be “good enough,” and we don’t have to feel like we can promise to be “good enough” next time. We don’t have to be able to promise God that if he just gives us one more chance, we’ll prove he didn’t make a mistake in giving it to us. In fact, that sort of attitude corrupts and poisons our worship, because it’s just one more of our myriad ways of smuggling self-salvation into our faith. Our salvation and God’s forgiveness are nothing we can earn or make happen. Our hope is not in anything we can do or anything we can claim for ourselves; our hope is only ever in the mercy of God.
Photo © 2015 Wikipedia user UBJ 43X; photo has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
