NOTES for Isa 5:16-25

"Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever before themselves!" These words are very hard to receive, because feeling unwise and unintelligent is unpleasant, and at times simply disastrous.

In Moscow there is a very good school for physics and mathematics, where the most talented children are gathered. This school produced an astonishing cluster of people active in science and education; among its graduates are many professors, and not only in physics and mathematics. But one day a boy who studied at this school took his own life and left a note that said, "I do not want to be a fool." And a girl who also studied at this school then had to spend many years treating her depression. And these two, alas, were by no means the only ones wounded in this way, wounded even to death. Is this good? Then why does the Bible call us to something like that: to feel unwise, unintelligent, in other words simply foolish, if that is so frightening?!

In fact, it is exactly the opposite: it is from this terrible darkness that the Lord warns us with these words. For what was the fall of the first human being? He wanted to be like God ("and you will be like gods" Gen 3:5), and God is, first of all, wise. But further: "...you will be like gods, knowing good and evil." And today the prophet also says, "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil." That is, woe to those who, knowing good, call it evil. Here the trouble is no longer that we know, but that, knowing, we pretend that we do not know: a kind of second fall "in the opposite direction."

So why should we fall away from God in that direction, or in the opposite one? If one somehow understands very deeply inwardly that God is many times wiser than the wisest among us human beings, if one always remembers this height, unattainable and unquestionable, then all our differences from one another are leveled out. They become barely noticeable, as the difference between houses, even skyscrapers, and shacks is barely noticeable when you look at them from an airplane window. The question itself simply loses meaning.

When you think about your own nothingness, your own foolishness, sinfulness, and uselessness, you inevitably come to the thought, "Then why am I alive?" Only one thing will save us: God, who is so wise, wiser than any wisest human being, loves me, wants me to live, "willed me to be." And then the question, "Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right?" simply ceases to exist. He loves me, He brought me here and blessed me for life, for "with each person God speaks before He creates..." (R. M. Rilke)

In today's passage from the prophet Isaiah, the Lord speaks of things that were perhaps even more characteristic of the twentieth century after Christ than of the eighth century before Christ, when Isaiah recorded the Lord's words. “Let Him make speed and hasten His work, that we may see it,” the Jews said then. “Cosmonauts flew into space and did not see any God there,” we said in the last century. “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and shrewd in their own sight,” the Lord replies. Death and destruction await a humanity that rejects the word of the Lord.

It is important to hear these words in their proper sense. This is not a threat of the kind we make to unruly children. It is a statement of a harsh truth: sin is a defect incompatible with life. The Lord tells us about the fruits of our own moral choices, which we ourselves refuse to see.

The words of the Lord that we read today in Isaiah's prophecy can be addressed directly to almost every one of us. Regardless of how much property we possess, in many respects we live “as though you alone were settled in the land.” This appears not only when we leave no living space for other people and take for ourselves everything we can. According to the prophet's word today, every instance of our disrespect for others and every humiliation of those around us is a grave sin. It is important to understand that “as though you alone were settled in the land” does not apply only to some high-ranking official for whom traffic across half of Moscow is stopped, as though he were the only one who needed to go somewhere. It applies no less to us when we jostle in the metro, trying to squeeze our bodies through and settle into a comfortable seat. Most frightening of all is that we behave in exactly the same way in the house of God.

The Lord says that what we obtain by disregarding the needs of others does us no good. Everything built on such disregard will be destroyed. The Lord Himself, by contrast, can serve as our example: He cares for the good and salvation of us all, even though we so neglect and betray His mercy.

The gift of prophecy is not necessarily accompanied by a poetic gift, but when this happens, the result is astounding. So in this chapter we see how God's truths revealed to Isaiah pour out into two works remarkable from a literary point of view: the parable of the vineyard and the denunciation with the sixfold repetition of the refrain "woe to those." It is no accident that the Son of God, who quotes the prophet Isaiah often, took these two passages as the basis for two of His sermons.