Thursday, April 11, 2019

Isaiah 58 the scope of repentance and redemption


Isaiah 58 -The Scope of Repentance and Redemption

 

            All Christians are called to repent. For those of us observing Lent, repenting along with prayer, fasting, and almsgiving is an important theme. Isaiah 58 caught my attention as it was one of our Church’s readings for the first Sunday in Lent. Whether you practice Lent or not, it seems to me that Isaiah 58 has a lot to tell us regarding the way of repentance. I will be quoting verses in Isaiah 58 from the Jewish Publication Society’s version of the Tanakh published as a 1992 Book of the Month selection. I enjoy the crisp modern wording of the translation and hope you will also.

            [1]        Isaiah 58:1 shows God calling upon Isaiah to speak his message boldly – “Cry with full throat, without restraint; Raise your voice like a ram’s horn! Declare to My people their transgression, to the house of Jacob their sin.”

            [2]        In Isaiah 58:2, we discover that God’s message through Isaiah especially targets the people who think they are faithful seekers of God. Isaiah 58:2 says, “To be sure, they seek Me daily, eager to learn My ways, like a nation that does what is right, that has not abandoned the laws of its God. They ask me for the right way, they are eager for the nearness of God.” (Isaiah 58:2) It is easy for us who believe we are earnestly seeking God to reach a point where we take our journeys of seeking righteousness for granted. We might remember a time when we sought God because we knew we needed His forgiveness, and His help to overcome our sinful ways and habits. Somewhere along the line we began taking our righteousness for granted. We began identifying as a righteous people, and gradually abandoned our search for righteousness, or we began to identify our search for righteousness within a mindset that thought of sin in certain ways which perceived sin differently than God does. We were still seeking God in our own way, but our own way was becoming dangerously close to being a way which in truth might well have come near to abandoning God’s ways.

            [3]        Isaiah’s message is fit for our season of Lent, when many of us practice some form of fasting, and trust that our fasting might help us draw nearer to God. The Bible teaches fasting as a way of seeking the Lord in some instances, but fasting can become for us an end in itself rather than a means to an end. God describes the sort of fasting he yearns to sees, saying “This is the fast I desire: to unlock the fetters of wickedness, and to untie the cords of the yoke - to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore you own kin.” (Isaiah 58:6-7)

            I suspect that part of where we can go so wrong in our practice of the faith is when we forget that God’s covenant is as much a covenant with a community in which we participate, as it is with us as individuals. If we imagine ourselves as in a mostly individual relationship with God, our understanding of pursuing righteousness will be in regard to things in our control. But if we understand that God has made a covenant with a nation and community of believers, we will begin to recognize that the pursuit of righteousness always has a communal context. If my thought is always my personal relationship I might be so obsessed with things about myself I can change, that I will hardly notice the persons in need within my community. Maybe I will resort to passing judgment as if the poor are always at fault for their poverty. Maybe I will not only neglect seeing the poor, but the troubled soul never quite able to get a healthy self-image or clarity of mind to pull themselves up out of what Bunyan called the “Slough of Despond.” An overly individualistic approach to the faith might cause us to sense no responsibility to our brothers and sisters in God’s community. We can imagine we are doing everything right, when in reality we have lost the center of faithfulness to God spelled out in “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.”

            [4]        In the final portions of Isaiah 58, Isaiah’s message addresses his audience in regard to how they were neglecting the Sabbath. I recognize that among Christians there are many who do not believe the Sabbath laws as such are binding on Christians. It seems to me that one does not have to hold that Sabbath laws are binding on the Christian, to realize that principles expressed in the Old Testament in the Sabbath Laws remain important as we journey through life, especially when the principles are set forth by the prophets as correctives upon incorrect uses of the Sabbath institutions.

            Isaiah expresses important principles that were not being practiced due to misuses of the Sabbath. We read his words which say, “If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath, from pursuing your affairs on My holy day; if you call the Sabbath “delight,” The Lord’s holy day “honored” and if you honor it and go not your ways, nor look to your affairs, nor strike bargains – then you can seek the favor of the Lord. I will set you astride the heights of the earth, and let you enjoy the heritage of your father Jacob – for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (Isaiah 58:13-14)

            Once more a community approach to Sabbath keeping was essential if the Sabbath was to be honored. The command was spoken to a community. It was to be kept by males and females, sons and daughters, the wealthy, servants, slaves, the immigrants who are visiting or living in our lands, even the cattle which pull our plows. If we view the Sabbath only as being spoken to us as individuals we dramatically lessen its message. The servant and slave, or small child, or immigrant working with little option in a strange land had little opportunity to choose whether or not they would keep the Sabbath. Within the community, it was the man or woman with the privilege of being a master, or an employer, who often determined whether or not the poor laborer, the servant, the slave, or the immigrant was going to be granted the Sabbath rest which would allow marginalized families to have a day to enjoy rest, conversation, and joys of community. The Sabbath did provide for the individual but it was also provision for families whose individual choice was marginalized apart from the employer, master, and wealthy privileged citizen in society pausing and recognizing that God has spoken to give all our people, and all our neighbors that rest to enable restoration from the weariness of a week’s labor each seventh day of the week.

            The Sabbath was in reality an institution of various Sabbaths. There was the Sabbath to be enjoyed one day out of each week. A second form of a Sabbath cycle was the seventh year Sabbath when one year out of each seven Israel was to allow its land to rest. Debts were to be concluded so that in the Sabbath year, the lives of God’s people might be renewed by lifting away burdensome hindering debt burdens.

            Finally, Israel had following the seventh year of a seven year cycle, the fiftieth year when a declaration of the year of Jubilee was pronounced. At this time Israel’s land would be distributed in such a way as to protect the original intent of the division of the property of Israel’s families when Israel entered the holy land under Joshua. Slaves would be set free. A new day would begin, in which God’s people would be endowed with the gifts allowing them to make use of their own properties to feed themselves and bring blessing to their neighbors.

            In Christian thought, the promise of Jubilee has sometimes been seen as pointing towards Christ’s redemptive work. The language especially seems to be present near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He entered the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth. He was handed a scroll to read from the prophet Isaiah. He read, “The Spirit of the Lord I on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19; which was a quoting of Isaiah 61:1-2)

            When we see that the various Sabbaths provided rest from the work of our weekly routines, rest from debt and rest for creation one year of each seven years, and a Jubilee re-ordering all of life according to God’s kind purposes, as Christians we can see how the Sabbath institutions pointed towards the favorable day of the Lord when Messiah himself would bring rest, healing, and restoration to the people.

            This restoration would be more than individualistic saving of our souls. It would be a communal restoration wherein participants would see neighbors in need and begin to seek ways to encourage those needing encouragement, and the community would be marked by those of us with gifts ministering to those with needs, who also had gifts ministering to our needs.

            How is the Church to do this when each of us recognizes that we are not strong or wealthy, or wise; but rather we are weak, often poor, and drawn from the foolish of this world? Is not our strength that we have been given eyes to see, ears to hear, and a few small fishes to be blessed when the Lord takes our small gifts and multiplies them to give need to the poor, encouragement to the troubled in soul, and the restoration of hope to the discouraged? We must ask the Lord to open our eyes to see the needy and we must ask our meager gifts to be multiplied because we understand this is the favorable year of our Lord. Christ has brought us into the favorable year as long as this is today.