NOTES for Isa 42:6-7
Toward the end of the Babylonian exile, when the second part of the Book of Isaiah was written, the Jewish people's understanding of God's people had changed somewhat under the influence of prophetic preaching from what it had been before the exile. Before the exile, in Judea—which was, on the whole, a relatively quiet and provincial country—the Jews themselves gave little thought to their role in world history, and no one around them asked such questions. Everything was different in Babylon: in order to preserve the faith of their fathers (otherwise the Jewish community faced a very real threat of assimilation), they had to answer both themselves and others—and in the metropolis that Babylon then was, there were many such others around them—the question of what God's people were, why humanity needed them, and what it meant to belong to them. Then, through a prophet who bore the name Isaiah like his great Jerusalem predecessor, it was revealed to the people that they did not exist for their own sake. Their task was to reveal to the pagan world their God, the God who had first revealed Himself to them, and to sanctify a world so urgently in need of sanctification, though unaware of its need.
Of course, many different conclusions could be drawn from the prophet's words about precisely how the world was to be sanctified and what had to be done. Many thought, for example, that one could be sanctified only by joining the Jewish people and becoming part of them. Others believed that those seeking the God of Israel did not need to join the people, but only to observe some of the commandments given by God and support the Synagogue. After the exile, all this gave rise to several waves of Jewish mission that bore fruit.
Yet before the coming of Christ no one conceived what Paul spoke and wrote about so often: that one can enter the Kingdom and be sanctified without any religion, that religiosity has no direct relation to the life of the Kingdom, just as it has no direct relation to salvation. A new revelation was needed to understand this, and receiving it proved far from easy—not only for the Synagogue, but for the Church itself.