NOTES for Isa 56:1-12

Today's reading touches on a question that is extremely important for understanding what the Kingdom is and what the people of God are. The view traditional for the era of Isaiah of Babylon came down to this: the people of God are the Jewish people, who, after all the trials that made them a cohesive ethnoreligious community, are by definition righteous and sanctified. Of course, these qualities were ascribed to the people as a whole, understood as a community that was not only national and religious, but also spiritual. It was thought that the unworthiness of individual members of the community in no way prevented the community as a whole from presenting an image of righteousness. Righteousness was perceived, in a certain sense, as an inherent quality of the community. As for everyone else, as well as some members of the community who were considered religiously deficient, such as eunuchs, the qualities of the community were thought not to extend to them. Even if, for example, a Gentile accepted Yahwism and became a Jew by entering the Synagogue (and Yahwism without the Synagogue was already unthinkable in those days), he was still not considered a full member of it; only his children, and sometimes his grandchildren, became such.

Isaiah, however, looks at this quite differently. Above all, this is because he understands that righteousness in principle cannot belong either to an individual person or to the community as a whole. Righteousness and judgment belong to God alone, and human righteousness and human judgment can at best be only a reflection of His righteousness (vv. 1-2). Only when a person becomes a witness and conduit of God's righteousness can he count on being justified on the day of Judgment and entering the Kingdom. Membership in the community alone is not enough; a certain quality of spiritual life is also needed, one given not by people but by God. And it can be given to anyone who seeks it, even to a person who, from the traditional point of view, is in no way fit for the Kingdom, such as that same eunuch or a foreigner who has no blood connection at all to the people of God, but who seeks the Kingdom and keeps righteousness (vv. 4-8).

Such a view of the people of God and of the Kingdom did not, of course, become understandable and acceptable to the Synagogue right away, although later the idea that Gentiles would begin actively joining the people of God with the coming of the Messiah prevailed in rabbinic tradition. But the full rightness of Isaiah of Babylon was revealed, of course, only with the coming of the Savior into the world.

For God there are no insiders and outsiders. We, on the contrary, become accustomed from childhood to dividing the world into good and bad, into those who are ours and those who are not. This is probably natural for our fallen nature: to cling to those nearby while pushing away those far from us. Israel, too, passed through this stage. Having become aware of being chosen by God, it was compelled to separate itself from other peoples by a wall of ritual prohibitions. All the more unusual for Israel, then, was Isaiah's message that the house of the Lord would be a house of prayer for all nations. But the time comes to grow up, to see that God is above our limitations. He is the God of all, He loves all, and He calls all to faith, so that for Him there is now “neither Greek nor Jew.” Is it not strange that, two and a half thousand years after this prophecy, we still find room in our religious views for nationalism, narrowness, and hostility?