Dialoguing with Isaiah

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, has said that the Bible is the record of the dialogue in which God and humanity find one another. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has said that “… the Bible is not a closed object but a dialogue partner whom we must address but who also takes us seriously. We may analyze, but we must also listen and expect to be addressed. We listen to have our identity given to us, our present way called into question, and our future promised to us.”

Isaiah 40. 21 - 31 takes us into that kind of dialogue because it presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, this passage says that God “sits enthroned above the circle of the earth” making us, its people, like grasshoppers to him. On this basis, we are as nothing to God and he can do with us as he pleases – we are pawns that he moves on a celestial chessboard, puppets manipulated by the divine puppetmaster - and so, we read:

“He brings princes to naught
   and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
No sooner are they planted,
   no sooner are they sown,
   no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
   and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.”

On the other hand, the passage also says that God calls each star into existence and that it is by his power and strength that they continue to exist. By implication the same is true of human beings – that God calls us into existence and sustains our existence too – as the passage says, he “gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.” In this part of the passage, God is not remote or distant, nor is he the chess or puppetmaster, instead he is alongside us as the creator and sustainer of life itself.

The passage is a dialogue and invites us to discussion and debate because the two pictures of God cannot be reconciled. God cannot be both the one who controls all things and the one who sustains all things in freedom. If God controls our every move then we have no free will but if we genuinely have free will then God must be limited in his power to control what occurs. This is a key part of the debate and dialogue – the conversation - which occurs in the Bible. It is a debate about the nature of God and it is a dialogue because these two different and ultimately irreconcilable pictures of God are presented.

Brueggemann has called these two pictures, the core testimony and the counter testimony. The core testimony is structure legitimating; that is to say it is about order and control – everything in its rightful place and a rightful place for everything. The counter testimony is pain embracing; that is to say it is about hearing and responding to the pain and suffering which is found in existence. The core testimony is “above the fray” while the counter testimony is “in the fray”.

The wonderful thing, it seems to me, about the Christian scriptures is that this debate and dialogue is resolved in favour of the counter testimony. René Girard writes that, in the Gospels, “God himself, the Word become flesh in Jesus, becomes the victim … The New Testament Gospels are the starting point for a new science or knowledge of humanity. This new knowledge begins with faith in Christ the innocent victim, and it becomes the leaven that will work itself out and expand to the point that the concern for victims becomes the absolute value in all societies molded or affected by the spread of Christianity.”

Similarly, Gerd Theissen writes that in the life, teaching and death of Jesus of Nazareth:

“religion takes an unprecedented turn, and becomes instead an agency of healing for the wounded. In the religion of the prophets, and in the religious commitment for which Jesus lived and died, we see the distillation of faith in a God who is on the side of the downtrodden rather than their oppressors, and who seeks to bring a new, supernatural order of justice and peace out of the natural laws of selection and mutation which spell death for the weak and powerless.”

Rowan Williams says that:

“All human identity is constructed through conversations, in one way or another. The gospel adds the news that, in order to find the pivot of our identity as human beings, there is one inescapable encounter, one all-important conversation into which we must be drawn. This is not just the encounter with God, in a general sense, but the encounter with God made vulnerable, God confronting the systems and exclusions of the human world within that world – so that, among other things, we can connect the encounter with God to those human encounters where we are challenged to listen to the outsider and the victim.”

All this means that we can and should pray for God to be alongside us to give us strength in our weariness and his power in our weakness so that we can soar on wings like eagles, run and not grow weary, walk and not be faint. In other words, that he will enter into our pain and enable us to live fully human lives; lives of responsible freedom, in contrast to the pawns and puppets who understand God to control their every move. Lives of responsible freedom lived for the benefit of others; lives lived listening and responding to the pain of those who are victims and outsiders.

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Joan Osborne - One Of Us.