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.