One of the things I did to enter into Advent this year was to read the Book of Isaiah from beginning to end. Like many Catholics, I've heard or read so much of the book over the years in the liturgy that it was easy to feel that I had read it. Even in my graduate OT class, we were pressed for time and only covered part of the book. So until now, I had never read the whole thing straight through.The parts of Isaiah I know best are from the second half of the book, known to many scholars as Deutero-Isaiah because it was almost certainly written in the time of the Babylonian exile, many years after the death of the prophet himself. These sections are comforting and uplifting. The reading that we use for the first reading of the Second Sunday of Advent features the Lord telling Isaiah to "comfort, comfort my people...speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her service is at an end" (Is 40:1). The second half of Isaiah is also where we find the great poems about the Servant of the Lord that prefigure the coming of Christ.With some notable exceptions (e.g. the Emmanuel prophecy in Is 7:10-16), the first half of the book is probably less well known. The prophet's voice is more harsh and unyielding. He condemns Israel as a "sinful nation," and a people "laden with wickedness." He condemns Israel's idolatry and its social injustice. Isaiah speaks of Assyria, the great empire to the north, as God's chosen instrument to punish Israel for its impiety.It's very easy to read these words too quickly and lose their import. Try to imagine the uproar that would ensue if a religious leader in this country suggested that the terrorist attacks of September 11th were divine retribution for our national sins. Actually, we don't have to imagine it. Pastors with political and theological views as diverse as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright have suggested as much, and their remarks produced the kind of national outcry that one would have predicted.I'm not defending the views of either man. I wonder, though, how much of the outrage was due not to their choice of sins worthy of punishment but to the very idea that the United States could be subject to God's judgment in this fashion. To those who think that such an idea is outrageous, I would point you to the words of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, which draws on similar themes:
If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."
If the first part of the Book of Isaiah has a lesson, it is that God is not impressed with the might and majesty of nations. That applies--in excelsis--to those that presume to bestride the world as empires. Assyria once dominated the eastern Mediterranean, but within little more than a century after its victory over the (northern) Kingdom of Israel, it had fallen to the Babylonian Empire, which in turn was displaced by the Persians roughly a century after that. Our God is a God of reversals, one who casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly (Lk 1:52).One wonders whether our newly elected president, contemplating the collapse of so many of our once-proud business institutions, the wreckage of grand dreams of remaking the world in our image, and the hardening of our attitudes toward those at the margins of life-the poor, the unborn, the immigrant-might find the courage to recall those words of Lincoln: "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." I suspect he will not. Perhaps it is a sign of how far our "Christian nation" has fallen from a true biblical faith.
