NOTES for Isa 40:1-31

Babylonian Isaiah was the first to say that the time of exile was drawing to an end, that the people had atoned for their sins and that the road to Judea, to the land of the fathers, would soon open to them again. Then a fully natural question arose before him in that situation: what is the people of God? That people, that community of Jerusalem residents deported to Babylon, with which the history of exiled Jewry had begun, no longer existed. There was a community, but it was different, new. New both spiritually and religiously. In essence, a new people, a new Jewry. A people that had received the chance to live another, second historical life. What connects it with the former people to which the Jerusalem residents deported to Babylon had belonged? Historical continuity? But is that not an illusion? What is historical memory?

What is a people, any people? Grass that dries up in the dry steppe under the rays of the hot summer sun. Here today, gone tomorrow. But can the people of God be like that? Surely God must have a plan for His people. His people cannot be drying grass in the field of history. So what makes the Jewish people God's people? The answer to the prophet was the vision revealed to him: the glory of God, the shining Presence moving through the wilderness toward Jerusalem.

Once, soon after the Babylonians devastated Jerusalem, another prophet, Ezekiel, in another vision had seen this same shining Presence leaving Jerusalem. Leaving because there was no longer room for God in Jerusalem. Not because of the Babylonian soldiers who destroyed the Temple, but because of those servants of God who had defiled it long before those Babylonian soldiers made the hidden thing visible. And now God was ready to return to the emptied city, to the ruined Temple.

The way had to be prepared for Him. The road had to be made level. And participation in that task alone could make the community born in Babylon the true people of God. Neither national features nor religion make God's people God's people, but active participation in carrying out God's design for the salvation of humanity. And witness to God, who had given His people a new historical life. A witness that all Judea would hear from Zion. And the whole world.

Through the prophet Isaiah the Lord calls His people to be comforted, yet He leaves 99 sheep in the mountains for the sake of one that has gone astray. The Lord "comes with might, and His arm rules," yet He takes the lambs in His arms and carries them at His breast.

These are not contradictions, although it may appear that community does not go hand in hand with individuality, or strength with tenderness. But the Lord shepherds the whole flock - the Church; it is all His body. And at the same time He died for each of us, and even if only one person remained on earth, the Lord would still have died for him on the Cross and, dying, would have looked at him with love and tenderness.

The Lord conquers our enemies with a strong hand, yet He also supports us if we stumble and carries us in His arms if we no longer have the strength to walk. But the most astonishing thing is that we are His children, and He calls us to the same thing: to be strong in weakness, to support, comfort, and strengthen the weak, and humbly allow ourselves to be comforted in weakness and sorrow; to live together, love one another, be the one Body of Christ - the Church, and personally answer for ourselves before God, standing firmly before Him in our individuality and trying to become again what He created us to be.

For us, the Bible is a word of consolation. People opening it for the first time most often say that it is a book about cruelty, vengeance, and the inevitability of punishment. But it is enough to make an effort and you will hear what God says to the human person, and how and what He taught His people. He says, "And all flesh shall see the salvation of God." All flesh: that is, no one is rejected, there are no better and worse people, no righteous and sinners; He offers salvation to everyone. When we read this text and the parable of the one lost sheep, we can understand this apparent injustice of merciful love. He seeks everyone, even when the others feel that they have been abandoned to their fate. When the one being sought is you, lost and thirsting for salvation, this is understandable and obviously right. It is harder to admit that for the moment you can wait while another person is found.

What can comfort persecuted people, who lost and their country and their saints? The promise for a new life, in which everything will still be as before? Perhaps. But such promise will hardly delight a spiritually mature person: indeed, it is impossible for such person not to understand that, if the new life is the same as was the former life, it will then also end so disastrously, as ended the former life.

Such a person can please not the return unto the past, no matter how much this past may seem happy from far, but an onward movement, which is unthinkable without spiritual renewal. It is not accidentally if the main comfort of the people turns out to be the news that their committed sin is forgiven, and its consequences are redeemed, such that now before them opens the possibility of a new life on the land of the ancestors, on which they can now return.

Before, the return on this land would have become the return to the past; now it will become a step to the future, to the future, where there will be many spiritual discoveries and revelations, to the messianic future, about which had already spoken the prophets before the period of captivity.

Without spiritual renewal the return in Judea would have been an undeserved reward, not bringing either joy, or benefits. After the renewal the return became the crown, which found his winner and the beginning of a new history of the people, who after the historic disaster that reached them, seemed to be condemned to disappearance and oblivion.

This beginning of the Book of Consolation of the prophet Isaiah, predicting the liberation of Israel from the Babylonian captivity, and moreover, as usual in the prophetic books, and several more things. And the first image that he uses, is so clear and evident insomuch that another prophet John the Baptist, will quote it in his sermon. Indeed, imagine yourselves: God goes to a hilly wilderness separating the Promised Land and Babylon, to fulfill the new Exodus, and He sends forward His crier so that people may prepare the way, worthy for the King of Kings.

It is interesting, how refracted these words were in the consciousness of people afterward: the punctuation is put in another place, after the word "wilderness", and the meaning has changed. “Voice of him that crieth in the wilderness” – it is when someone shouts, and no one listens. It was not like that with Isaiah, neither with John. Why the accent was so moved? Certainly, because in Christians time people began naturally to interpret these words in the spiritual sense: God goes towards each of us to save us from sin and death, but in order that He enters our heart, confession and the correction of our life (" to prepare the way") are necessary, and here is where is shown our "deafness", and whoever call us to confession, find himself in emptiness...

The image of the Messiah as shepherd appears often in Isaiah's preaching, and also in that of other prophets. In the Gospel, Jesus too often speaks of Himself as the good shepherd. Today this image may seem somewhat humiliating to us, for if we follow the logic of the image, we must feel ourselves to be sheep and rams. Not a very pleasant association. Meanwhile, in antiquity sheep and rams, and domestic animals generally, were viewed somewhat differently, especially in societies that grew out of a pastoral, nomadic tradition.

Of course, there could be nothing like the sentimentality toward domestic animals sometimes found today. But there was something else: responsibility for the whole flock and for each sheep in it. Both in the prophets and in Jesus Himself we often meet the image of a bad shepherd, for whom the flock is only a source of income, food, and wool, and who cares nothing for the sheep. Such a shepherd merely uses the flock as a thing, and in case of danger, for example an attack by predators, immediately abandons it: his own life is worth more than the income.

The real, good shepherd loves his sheep. Not as equals, of course, but even God cannot love us as equals: we are not equal to Him by definition and never will be. But we are His, and if so, then above all He is responsible for us and loves us, and does not simply use us to solve His tasks in this world. With us, of course, it is in many ways more complicated for Him than even for a good shepherd with his sheep: unlike sheep, we possess free will, which God has to take into account. And possessing it, we can always do something no ram would ever think of.

But His love for us remains unchanged, just as a good shepherd loves his flock and every sheep in it, even one that is not very obedient and for that reason sometimes has to be searched for throughout the area. And he rejoices over such a sheep more than over all the rest of the flock. Because a good shepherd feels responsible for every sheep. And loves every one as well. Just as the Messiah loves each of us. And for this reason becomes our good shepherd.

Today we begin reading the second half of the book of the prophet Isaiah, written in the middle of the sixth century BC. The unknown prophet usually called Second Isaiah began writing it while still in the Babylonian captivity and finished it in postexilic Jerusalem. His prophecy begins in Babylon with a word of hope and consolation. Today we read an astonishing hymn to the Creator’s might. The prophet sings this hymn while still in captivity, seeing only the very beginning of the complex historical processes through which God grants freedom to His people. The prophet’s main idea is that nothing can resist the Creator’s will. “His understanding is unsearchable,” and we cannot see all His ways, but His power is irresistible. Therefore, the prophet says, there is a great and inexhaustible hope for all of us: “those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary.”

In the biblical books, the expressions "image of God" and "likeness of God" often occur. On the other hand, the prophets said more than once that God has and can have no image, reminding people of the meaning of the second commandment of the Decalogue. Of course, this commandment refers in particular to sacred statues and sacred images, so widely spread among all pagan peoples both in antiquity and in modern times. But the issue, as we can see, is not only images of gods that have nothing to do with the One. The story of the golden calf comes to mind involuntarily: after all, the Jews demanded of Aaron that he "make" for them not some pagan god, but a metal image of the One who had brought the people out of Egypt. Yet this did not reduce at all the anger of Moses when he came down from the mountain.

Why is that? Perhaps because the image of the sacred bull symbolized Apis, or Baal, or someone else unknown, but only not the God of Abraham and Moses? And in the mass religious consciousness, unfortunately, neither Apis nor Baal ever rises to the God of Abraham. But the God of Abraham almost inevitably gets lowered to Apis. And then Yahwism turns into paganism covered with a monotheistic wrapper, the worst kind of paganism possible: open paganism, after all, does not claim to be the only true faith; it does not present itself as monotheism. But paganism born inside a monotheistic tradition demands the same attitude toward itself as toward what gave birth to it, deceitfully appropriating the worship owed to the God of Abraham. And under the appearance of a path leading to truth, it offers the worshiper a path into a spiritual dead end.

What the prophet Isaiah says was once formulated very simply by a four-year-old boy. He reasoned approximately this way: God created the sea, the sky, trees, and the human being. The human being made the car, the house, and the airplane. If God created such things, then He has intelligence and uses it. But what He made is very different from what I make; therefore His intelligence is stronger than mine. And how much stronger, I cannot measure.

The simplicity of children's explanations is something the Lord constantly calls us to learn. Is the text of the prophet Isaiah difficult? Of course it is; and when you are exhausted and weary, you are not thinking about the greatness of God, or about realizing that He has His own ways for you. It is hard to acknowledge that He is smarter, higher, and wiser than a human being, and to accept this fact not only with the head but with the heart. Yet simple and open observation of the world allows us to discern this fact and accept it.

In antiquity many knew and spoke about the God who is "unlike anything." In fact, the whole apophatic tradition proceeds from the understanding that God or the Absolute is so unlike anything in our world that He can be defined not by likening Him to anything, but by unlikening Him from everything and everyone. Of course, no positive definitions are possible in this case; only negative ones are possible. And certainly all this can be applied fully to the God of Israel. Yet there is an essential difference between the God of the Bible and the Supreme Mind or Absolute of Greek or Indian mystics. Neither the Supreme Mind nor the Absolute condescends to the human person, who is absolutely indifferent to them. But from the very beginning of the history of Yahwism, the God of Israel speaks with the human person, overcoming the abyss that separates Him from the human person, while remaining infinitely distant in His essence from the person with whom He communicates. So in what does the dissimilarity of which the prophet speaks consist? And in what sense, then, does the Bible say of the human person that he is created "in the image and likeness" of his Creator? Perhaps in the fact that every person is always in some way similar to every other person, possessing self-consciousness and free will? Yes, perhaps. But here, apparently, also lies the main dissimilarity between God and every creature. Everything created is in one way or another subject to certain laws external to itself that limit it. Everything created is natural, even if the creature has a spiritual principle, as for example humans or angels do. And nature is always limited; it is limited by definition, insofar as it exists according to laws that it did not establish for itself. Even a spiritual creature is limited: the self-consciousness and free will proper to every spiritual being are preserved, but the measure of this freedom remains incomplete. Full freedom is possible only when the one living determines for himself the laws by which he lives, and determines them fully and absolutely. But only God can possess such full freedom, for He Himself determines for Himself all forms of His own being. For Him there are no external laws with which His will would have to reckon, and His freedom is absolute. Here, apparently, lies the main difference between God and the created world. This difference will remain forever: even after transformation, creation will not cease to be creation; it will only begin to exist according to other laws. Only for God does no external law exist. And therefore no limits and no boundaries exist.

Reasoning on God's power and powerlessness of man became a common point for every believer. But few are the ones who think that this doesn’t only apply to certain critical situations, when man can really change nothing, but also the human life in general.

Man in this sense is a unique being. God created us "from dust ", as well as all other animals, but our unique and irreplaceable life is what makes us human (in certain translations it is generally called "soul"), we receive with this the " breath of life ", that God breathes to us "in nostrils".

So paradoxical at first sight, is this situation: "breath" is not ours, but life and personality are ours! It turns out that we men since the beginning had been created by God to live our own life, as all other animals, but life, borrowed to God. And He gives us this life in loan, but in such circumstances that we did not feel bound by too much strict conditions, didn’t have too many bans and so that we feel completely free as regards the received instructions.

Such freedom is given to us; reason why and such an idea of the loan of life to God does not even arise, even when we turn back to our Lender. Here is, it turns out difficult to just inhale profoundly, standing back to Him. Well then the breath begins to weaken, and life and forces to leave, even if we do not notice it suddenly. But in the critical situations, their insufficiency becomes immediately noticeable, and then we remember the One Who gave us and life and strength and freedom.

This question is addressed to the people of Israel by the prophet, each of us can refer it to himself, and besides particularly in such form: hast thou not known, hast thou not heard? Certainly, I know that it is God who created the whole world. But why have I decided that after that He "fainted and was weary"? It is said that on the seventh day God rested from all His works, but it is not said that He fainted. And no matter when this "seventh day" will be, the whole Bible speaks about the continuation of God's activities. He is the One who takes care of Adam, He warns Cain, He saves Noah and calls Abraham. Et cetera, et cetera...

And if He continues to act, how can I then be despair? Indeed, He is good, He loves and He is almighty. In any second everything in this world can change in a cardinal way, at any time can come true the Second Advent of the Christ, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth. Yes, it is impossible to predict clearly when it will be, for “there is no searching of his understanding”, but then it will still be.