NOTES for Isa 66:18-21

"As a mother comforts someone, so I will comfort you, and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem..." Sergey Averintsev has an article about the word "blagoutrobny," which in modern Russian is translated as "merciful," "compassionate." In classical Greek this word had an exclusively medical aspect in the sense of a healthy belly. But when it enters biblical culture, it suddenly acquires a new meaning. "One question remains: do the authors of the Old and New Testaments really see in God's love for people, in Christ's love for people, and in Christians' love for one another the features of such a specific kind of love as 'womb-like' maternal pity? Does the image of YHWH, which so often appears to us as the absolute embodiment of a strictly fatherly principle, have something maternal in it? This important question should be answered in the affirmative."

And then Averintsev turns precisely to the text of Isaiah that we are discussing with you today. Often a person of our day, accustomed to various kinds of "gender studies," asks us and himself a crafty question: why is our, or your, God male, and things of that sort? Further on this quite often leads such people to call the Mother of God a goddess. But in reality today we see the very important fact that everything is much more complicated. And we should not, in an ecumenical impulse, search Christianity for yin and yang, for genuine ecumenism is not so simple either.

Further on Sergey Sergeyevich recalls another passage from Isaiah. "'Zion says: YHWH has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me. Can a woman forget her nursing child? Will she not have compassion on the son of her womb? Even if they forget, I will not forget you' (Isa 49:14-15)." "Thus, God is more mother than mother herself," says Averintsev. Let us never hurry in Holy Scripture; let us truly strive in our study of it for the spirit of "chastity, humility, patience, and love."

Formal ritualism is condemned in terms so severe that they might seem to condemn every kind of ritual, which would be strange after all the detailed descriptions of Temple rites and of the Temple's very design. Yet the prophetic words do not deny the need for ritual actions; they remind us in whose name they are performed. They help us encounter the higher reality of God, who transcends everything conceivable and inconceivable and reveals to us what we could never discover by thought alone.

The book draws to a close, and once again the most important revelations it contains pass before us in condensed form. Each is astonishing in its own way, but even against this background, the prophecy about the priests and Levites whom the Lord will take from all nations is striking. It speaks of the brothers of the prophet's listeners—but is it only brotherhood according to the flesh that is meant? Are not all who come to God and thereby become part of God's people called to become brothers and sisters?