NOTES for Isa 51:1-23
Today's reading is devoted to the theme of the people's redemption and liberation. Apparently, the prophetic sermon given here was spoken shortly before Babylon was taken by the Persians, when liberation was indeed already near, but few believed in it, since to all the city's inhabitants Babylon seemed an impregnable fortress that no one, not even Cyrus the Great, could capture. Most likely, some persecution of the Jewish community did take place in these final years of Babylonia's existence, and Isaiah encourages those who, perhaps out of fear of persecution, had decided if not on outright apostasy, then perhaps on certain compromises in matters of faith (vv. 12-14). And the prophet says that soon the situation will completely change, and the recent persecutors will themselves be persecuted, experiencing the same thing they forced the people of God to endure (vv. 22-23).
At first glance, what we have before us is a purely mechanical understanding of justice, presupposing the well-known principle "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Yet even the Torah allows such an approach only in condescension to the spiritual weakness and vengefulness of fallen humanity. And in this case, apparently, what we have before us is still not simply joy that today's persecutors will experience what the persecuted are experiencing today. Apparently, it is rather a question of a kind of "law of retribution" that operates in the fallen world with the inevitability of a swinging pendulum: evil unjustly inflicted on an individual person or an entire people always, in one way or another, returns to the one or ones who committed that evil.
Of course, in this case there can be no talk of justice, because those who suffer from the "return blow," especially in cases involving not individual people but peoples and tribes, are usually not at all the ones who were guilty of the evil committed. Here one must speak rather of a kind of "law of conservation of evil" in the fallen world, where evil, once committed, never disappears without a trace, but generates a chain of consequences governed by certain laws that are not very clear to us and have nothing in common either with God's commandments or with any moral norms. And before the coming of Christ it was completely impossible to break such a chain, generated by evil once committed. It was only possible to remove from the blow those who were needed for the fulfillment of God's plan, if, of course, those being removed gave God that possibility by agreeing to follow Him and do His will. Such was the world before the coming of Christ. A world that did not yet know the Kingdom.