(Isaiah 6:8-13, Isaiah 43:1-21; Matthew 13:10-17)
I said last week that in Isaiah 40-55, we see God’s plan for the world shifting into a new phase, away from his servant Israel and toward a new Servant who will be faithful to carry out God’s mission for the world—a Servant whom we will ultimately see as the suffering Servant, a role Israel had refused to play. I noted that a lot of people miss this because of the way modern scholarship has taught us to read this section of Isaiah—they read it as disconnected from the rest of the book, and so they fail to note the fact that this shift isn’t a new or surprising thing. In fact, it’s something which God told Isaiah was going to happen all the way back at the beginning of his ministry, when God first called him as a prophet. God brings Isaiah into the throne room of heaven and says, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” Isaiah answers the call, and God gives him his message and his marching orders—and is it a message of hope and redemption? Is it the mission to go out and bring Israel back to the Lord?
No; in fact, it’s anything but. God tells Isaiah, “Go tell this people, ‘Keep listening, but never understand what you’re hearing; keep looking, but never make any sense of what you’re seeing.’” Then he says, “Make the heart of this people fat”; the NIV translates that “calloused,” which isn’t bad, but isn’t quite right, either, because it’s not really that the people of Israel are hard-hearted, but that they’re sluggish and self-indulgent. The Old Testament scholar John Oswalt puts it well when he says, “A ‘fat heart’ speaks of a slow, languid, self-oriented set of responses, incapable of decisive, self-sacrificial action.” So far from being roused from their complacency and self-satisfied self-centeredness, Israel will only sink further into it. God continues, “Stop their ears and shut their eyes; otherwise they might see, hear, and understand, and they might turn and be healed.”
In short, Isaiah has been told to tell Israel, “Don’t listen to me, because God wants to destroy you.” Now, does that sound like God? Does that sound like the God who was so determined to bring the people of Nineveh to repentance that he sent a fish after Jonah? Does that sound like the God who sent his Son to earth to live and die and rise again that we might be saved? No, it doesn’t. It’s easy to understand why the people of God have struggled with this passage from earliest times, and have often chosen to turn the commands into mere predictions. The key is, though, is that God isn’t really sending Isaiah out because he wants the people of Judah to reject his message; his command to his prophet is ironic. Indeed, irony will prove an appropriate response to Isaiah’s situation, and will mark much of his preaching. God sends him out to preach both warning and promise, both judgment and salvation, knowing that the effect of Isaiah’s preaching will not be to lead Israel back to their Lord, but only to drive them further away, toward judgment. And so for Isaiah, this isn’t a statement of purpose, but a warning as to what he will actually accomplish in the ministry God has given him.
This, I think, is why he responds as he does. He doesn’t ask why he has to do such a thing, or how he’s supposed to do it, because he understands what God is saying; instead, he asks, “How long?” If judgment is coming, how long will it last, and how bad will it be? The answer is harsh: God’s people will be almost completely destroyed—but only almost. A few will survive the devastation, and they will be burned again, but yet, they will not be dead; they will be a stump capable of putting out new growth. There will yet be a holy seed, a remnant that will rise again.
Now, the interesting thing about Jesus citing this passage is that there are a number of parallels between Isaiah’s situation and his own. In both cases, we have people seeing God; just as Isaiah has a vision of God on the throne, surrounded by the host of heaven, and he responds with awe and obedience, so the disciples see God in the flesh, in the person of Jesus Christ, and they too respond with awe and obedience (and also love). Remember what we said last week about blindness and sight; the disciples, like Isaiah, see God and know him for who he is, and respond accordingly. In that, they stand in the sharpest of contrasts to unbelieving Israel, which hears but won’t listen, which sees but will not understand.
Both Isaiah and those who followed Jesus found themselves in a small group set apart from their surrounding culture, at odds with the leaders of their nation; Isaiah’s preaching made him some disciples, but more enemies, especially among the powerful, and the same was true of Jesus. This might seem strange to us; both, certainly, preached judgment, which is never a popular message, but both also proclaimed the grace of God. The truth is, however, that the message of grace doesn’t always soften hearts; sometimes it hardens them. In some cases, I think people steel themselves against it, out of fear or pride, while in others, the only response is contempt; but just as the sun of God’s love melts the ice in some hearts, in others, it only hardens the clay.
Despite that, God doesn’t stop reaching out; he simply shifts his method. That, as Jesus explains to his disciples, is why he teaches in parables. There’s an interesting thing here in the way in which the gospels report this. Matthew, which we read this morning, follows the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Old Testament, and understands Jesus to say, “I speak to them in parables because ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen or understand’”; if you flip over to Luke 8, though, it reads, “To others I speak in parables so that ‘though seeing they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand.’” This might seem contradictory—did Jesus teach in parables because the crowds wouldn’t understand, or so that they wouldn’t understand?—but in truth it isn’t; it’s two sides of the same coin.
Many in Jesus’ audience weren’t receptive to the gospel; he preached to them knowing that the only possible effect, and thus the only possible purpose, of his work would be to reinforce their unwillingness to receive him and his message. Since that was the situation, he chose to teach in a manner appropriate to their fatness of heart, just as Isaiah did—but he continued to teach and to do the work of the kingdom of God, so that those who knew their blindness could receive sight, and those who knew they could not hear might have their ears opened, and thus would come to understand and be healed.
We see this same determination at work in Isaiah 43. Last week’s passage ends on a fairly grim note—“Who handed Jacob over to become loot, and Israel to the plunderers? Was it not the Lord, against whom we have sinned? For they would not follow his ways; they did not obey his law. So he poured out in them his burning anger, the violence of war. It enveloped them in flames, yet they did not understand; it consumed them, but they did not take it to heart.” And this is after the introduction of the Servant; this is, I think, a prophecy that was ultimately fulfilled in the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. And yet, how does chapter 43 begin? “But now, this is what the Lord says—he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.”
It’s a powerful and majestic promise—delivered to people whom God has just declared deaf, blind, and utterly intransigent. Indeed, after declaring the ransom he will pay to buy his people back and his intention to gather them to himself from every direction and the farthest corners of the earth, we get this: “Lead out those who have eyes but are blind, who have ears but are deaf.” Israel is summoned into the court together with the nations—because remember, they’re all blind and deaf together now, due to their idolatry—and once again, God makes his case: “Who has predicted this? Who but me saw it coming? Can any of your gods make such a claim? If so, bring in your witnesses to support it—even one. No, only I have any witnesses—my people, you are my witnesses; you can testify to all that I’ve done for you, and all the promises I’ve fulfilled.” And note what God says about why he chose them: “so that you may know and believe me.” Not so that others might know; that was indeed part of the idea, but it was necessary first that they would know God, and come to trust him—and they’d never really gotten to that point themselves. No wonder they had so little effect on the nations around them.
We see here God calling out to his blind, deaf, fat-hearted people, summoning them to bear witness to all the ways in which he had blessed them—and in so doing, perhaps to see that themselves for the first time, and actually begin to understand themselves as the people of God. The problem doesn’t appear to be that they’ve forgotten that God did all these things—they can bear witness to that easily enough—but rather that they’ve lost any sense that that means anything to them; they don’t see it as connected to their lives. They don’t understand that it means that God is their deliverer, their savior, and the only savior there is or ever can be, even though their very existence and the history of their people is the evidence for that truth. Time after time, God has made promises to his people and then fulfilled them, and used those fulfilled promises as the basis for new promises, which he has then fulfilled in turn; time after time, he has delivered his people, and time after time, he has pronounced judgment which has then come to pass. Israel has seen it all—and yet they have seen nothing.
Even so, God says, they will be his witnesses yet again, as he does it yet again; the one who led his people out of their exile in Egypt by the way through the sea, drowning the pursuing armies of the Pharaoh behind them, will bring his people out of their exile in Babylon as well, and back once more to the land he promised their ancestors. God will be faithful to his people even though they have not been faithful to him; in John Oswalt’s term, his “passionate grace” toward his people will not permit him to do otherwise. But look: having just reminded them of the Exodus, having just used that to identify himself as the one who delivered and will deliver them, having just summoned them to bear witness to all the things he has done for them, what does God now say to his people? “Forget the former things—don’t dwell on the past. See, I’m doing a new thing!”
Why does he say that? Obviously, it’s not a command to collective amnesia. Rather, I think, Isaiah is using hyperbole to startle his audience into opening their eyes and ears and actually hearing him, and seeing what God is doing. God is not only present and active in the past, but also in the present—theirs and ours—and they had no sense of that. They had no concept of what God was doing in their own time, or what he might be calling them to do; they knew all about the Exodus, they’d heard about it a million times before, and they would no doubt have told you they believed God had delivered their ancestors from Egypt. What they didn’t believe was that that had anything to do with their lives and circumstances. They believed God had saved, but not that he would save—and that makes all the difference. It’s not that hard to believe that God has done miracles in the past—but that he’s still in the miracle business now? That’s another matter.
And so too often, we as Christians in this country are like those Jews in captivity in Babylon—we have this nice little box labeled “God” full of all sorts of things God did a while ago, and it really doesn’t have a lot to do with how we live our daily lives. We pray, though maybe not that much, and we read our Bibles, at least a little, but when it comes to the issues we face and the choices we have to make, a lot of us are functional atheists—we do things just like the world does. Not only do we not ask God to guide us, a lot of the time, we don’t even take him into account—we base our decisions solely on “practical” considerations, things we can see and touch and quantify. And that’s not how God wants us to live. He wants us to remember, in everything we do, that we are children of the Lord of the Universe, that he loves us, and that he’s working for our good—including in ways we can’t predict, or see coming. He wants us to walk by faith, not by sight. He wants us to hear him saying, “See, I’m doing a new thing—it’s springing up right before your eyes. Don’t you see it? I’m making a way in the desert, and streams in the wasteland. Can’t you see? Look. Open your eyes. See.”