NOTES for Isa 63:1-19
Today's reading continues the theme of the people's redemption and renewal, and in a somewhat unusual aspect. It is no surprise that the people's fate changes only when God Himself intervenes in events. No one else cares about the people of God, and so God acts alone (vv. 1-6). It is quite logical that, in connection with this divine intervention, the prophet turns his thoughts to the history of the Jewish people, which provided more than enough material for analogies (vv. 7-14). But the conclusion of his reflections is rather unexpected: he comes to the conclusion that the people whom God saves from destruction are, in a certain sense, strangers to the former Israel (vv. 15-16).
Of course, this also means that a people who have turned away from God, as sadly happened more than once before the exile, in fact cease to be the people of God. Spiritually they are truly alien both to Abraham and to the Israel that was born at Sinai on the day the covenant was made. But the matter is not only this spiritual discrepancy. Apparently the prophet understands perfectly well that the renewal of the people, which happened solely by God's mercy and completely changed their fate, made them qualitatively different. Post-exilic Jewry is different; it cannot be regarded simply as the descendants of Jerusalem's inhabitants deported several decades earlier.
The history of pre-exilic Jewry really had ended. The former people no longer existed; they had traveled their path and lived out the span of natural historical life allotted to them, a span that every people has just as each individual person has a natural span of life. And what was happening before Isaiah's eyes was plainly a true miracle: God gave His people another, new life, one that by no natural, social, or historical laws could or should have existed.
Isaiah has no illusions about the spiritual condition and historical fate of his own people (vv. 17-19). And he understands that all the coming centuries of his people will be one continuous miracle. The miracle of God's redemption and God's love.