Michelangelo’s Isaiah cuts a majestic figure, dressed in luminous garments, with a great cloak billowing about him. The noble countenance expresses a profound concentration, and one understands that the seer is gazing into a realm that is hidden to others. Yet his brow is furrowed and a degree of tension reveals itself in his whole body as he turns to listen to the cherub who is speaking excitedly to him. Why is the cherub pointing to the Fall of Man, depicted behind the prophet? And why has the sculptor settled on this expression, at once so rapt and so anguished, for his portrait?
It was in a year of political turmoil in Judah during the seventh century BC that Isaiah experienced a shattering event which forever changed him: In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord …
For 50 years King Uzziah had ruled over Judah, and the nation had enjoyed a season of expansion and prosperity; yet, as so often happens during a period of material enrichment, there was a corresponding decline in moral values. Isaiah had become acutely aware of the inequities and evils of the society in which he lived, and of God’s disapprobation:
He looked for justice (mishpat) but saw bloodshed (mishpach)
For righteousness (tzedakah) but heard cries of distress (se’akah)
Zion was once “full of justice” but was now full of other things: idolatry, greed, violence, and a faithless dependence on wealth and military might. Yet Judah’s complacency had been rocked when King Uzziah’s illustrious reign came to an ignominious end. The king had gone into the temple and attempted with his own hands to burn incense; immediately an ominous white spot sprang up on his forehead, and he was hastily thrust from the temple as a leper. The affliction of the king, as representative of his people, suggested that the sins of Judah could no longer be hidden.
Isaiah’s Shattering Vision
Chapter 6 of the book of Isaiah breaks in like a shaft of lightning upon a stormy scene: the prophet’s blinding vision, which came to him in the temple. Because it is specified as taking place in the year that King Uzziah died, a contrast is immediately set up between the earthly prince and the absolute divine King who now appears to the prophet. As if a veil had been drawn aside, Isaiah saw what lay beyond: the Lord seated in majesty upon a throne, exalted far above his human subjects, with the train of his robe falling down to sweep the floor, joining heaven and earth.
Even as the vision filled Isaiah’s gaze, he heard the song of the six-winged seraphs surrounding the throne, in appearance like burning flames ascending heavenward. They covered their faces before the presence of the divine majesty, consumed in adoration, and chanted in antiphon:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts ;
The whole earth is full of his glory …
The cascading holiness of the Lord, who is not the God of Israel only but the Maker of heaven and earth, poured itself out in the beauty and order of the world, set like a gem in the starry spaces of the universe. Listening to the seraphic song, Isaiah saw the temple filling with a celestial glory, felt the ground shudder beneath his feet and saw the doorposts of the temple trembling, just as Sinai had quaked when the Lord descended.
It might be thought that such a vision would produce rapture in the prophet; instead, he felt lost, undone, ruined. The angelic revelation, the Trisagion, set the loftiness of the incomparably exalted Lord over against men whose hearts were lifted up in pride, and heedless of the Holy One they professed to worship. The vision also laid bare Isaiah’s own heart, and it was devastating. He realized that the sickness that infected Judah had invaded his own soul; that he too was doomed, that he was a man of unclean lips, dwelling in the midst of a people of unclean lips.
Yet no sooner had he made this confession made than one of the seraphs flew to him, bearing a burning coal taken from the altar, and laid it on his lips, pronouncing that his sin had been taken away. Isaiah was cleansed not by his own efforts but purely by the grace of God, and the subsequent call broke upon his soul like a thunderclap:
Whom shall I send? And who will go for Us?
The query was not specifically addressed to Isaiah, but the answer immediately welled up out of his own heart: Here am I, send me. It was a consecration to service that was freely offered, and which did not falter as the full significance of his mission was borne in on him.
Who could dream of so challenging an assignment, or so difficult a message, as that which was now entrusted to the prophet? The word he was to bring the people of Judah was essentially one of warning and judgment: the refining fire that had rested on his own lips was a forecast that the whole of Israel was about to be purged in fire and suffering. As the people continued to harden their hearts against his message, it would lead to mounting tragedy: destruction of cities, houses, land, and eventual deportation.
It was a mission that would require a heart steeled to an impossible pitch of devotion, and prepared to endure any measure of rejection. Yet Isaiah’s task was not completely futile. Finally, when the tree of Judah was cut down, new life would spring up from the stump; and beyond the destruction there was hope.
His Daunting Mission
This was the ministry that Isaiah embarked upon and pursued with undaunted courage in the tempestuous decades that followed. Through the reigns of the kings succeeding Uzziah – Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah – Isaiah carried out his unflinching service, even as he traced the hand of God in all the great political events of his day, and interpreted them to his people. He observed the overweening ambitions of potentates, the will to power of ruling classes, the arrogance of the great empires about tiny Judah. The coal that had cauterized his lips gave him scorching words, but there were also great assurances of compassion and comfort that emanated from a deeper place, his sanctified heart.
Isaiah’s consistent message focused on God’s justice (mishpat) and righteousness (tsedekah). “God is exalted in justice” he wrote, suggesting that divine justice also involved a manifestation of his righteousness and compassion. He understood that the fullest expression of God’s majesty was not in the display of his ultimate sovereignty and power, but rather in the revelation of his overflowing heart of mercy. The passion with which the prophet then condemned injustice sprang out of sympathy with this divine benevolence.
Justice, for Isaiah, was not an abstract ideal, or a “virtue” in the Socratic sense, but rather the source of blessings for humanity. The establishment of a just society was therefore one of the primary responsibilities of kings and rulers, and one of the fundamental purposes of the Sinai covenant. The prophet understood, moreover, that all history was the theater for the display of divine justice; and that the exercise of right and wrong determined the rise and fall of kingdoms. Yet he knew that those responding positively to his preaching would be few in number, that his own generation would reject his message, and the impending disaster of exile would not be averted.
His prophetic soul foresaw the great armies bearing down upon Judah, and he warned that the destroyers of “the Lord’s vineyard” would be foreign invaders who would come as the Lord “whistled” for them. The northern kingdom of Israel was despoiled by the ruthless empire of Assyria in 721 BC, and the tribes deported; Assyria then came to “shake a fist at the mount of the daughter of Zion,” but Judah remained unscathed – yet a darker threat would emerge. After Assyria had declined and fallen, Babylon would arise.
Eventually, the disaster fell on Judah like a hammer blow. In 586 BC Jerusalem was broken down under the battering rams of Nebuchadnezzar, her temple destroyed and the king and leading citizens sent into exile. The desolation of those carried away into Babylon was expressed in the haunting cadences of Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
There we wept, when we remembered Zion.
Having suffered the loss of homeland, temple and identity, the Judahites were then humbled further in the overwhelming presence of the world-dominating aspirations of the empire. Surrounded day and night by the evidence of Babylonian power and wealth, in a city filled with prodigious images of gods, they knew that, humanly speaking, there was no hope for Israel as a nation, nor for their exile to come to an end.
Exile, Hope, and a New Exodus
Into this situation of disaster, Isaiah delivered an astounding message, found in chapters 40 to 55 of his book. It begins with a passage unmatched for sustained power and loftiness of vision, sounding great notes of mercy and compassion, speaking tenderly to the hearts of a people whose whole world had been destroyed. These are words that seem to unfold a glimpse of the innermost being of God, consumed with love and pity for those whom he had to chastise so severely, and yearning over his wayward children. The exile, Isaiah was saying, should not be interpreted as meaning that the Lord had finished with his people, nor that he had revoked the eternal covenants he made with Abraham and David.
There was, in fact, reason for them to have hope, and that reason was to be found in the nature of God. The power and sovereignty of Yahweh were based by the prophet upon the fact that he is Creator of all things and Lord of the whole earth, and is therefore able to act in history to bring about an “everlasting salvation,” a redemption which is fundamentally a new act of creation. Lift up your eyes, says Isaiah:
See who has created these things,
Who brings out their host by number;
He calls them all by name,
By the greatness of His might
And the strength of His power;
Not one is missing.
To Yahweh the nations were like “a drop in the bucket,” and Isaiah presents him as being in total control of the rise and fall of empires. He calls forth the Babylonians as his judgment rod against his people, then casts them aside and raises up the Persians under their messianic leader Cyrus, who in 539 BC would issue the decree allowing the exiles to return to Jerusalem.
And the One who had formerly parted the Red Sea would open rivers on bare heights and fountains in the midst of valleys, and miraculously transform the wilderness to aid his people in their journey. Their homecoming to Zion would be so spectacular that it would show forth his salvation to the whole world; this new event would so far exceed the exodus from Egypt that the past could be remembered no more. After the dark days of exile the people of Judah would flourish again and become the blessing to the peoples of earth that God had always intended them to be.
The True Goal of Life
Yet Isaiah’s vision penetrates even beyond this restoration, and becomes cosmic in scope. Throughout his career he had come to understand the corruption of the human heart that leads to so much of the violence and disorder in society. Profoundly aware of the plight of men and women, their desperate need and helplessness, he wrestled for the truths that alone could answer their most earnest questions and satisfy their deepest longings. And then he preached to them his uncompromising message, and out of his own traumatized heart, on fire with love, he taught the way that leads to salvation: the power and unfailing compassion of their God.
The eternal truths Isaiah discovered were expressed in words possessing a sublimity and a moral clarity that are almost unparalleled, and they have rung down the ages. In his great masterpiece of Hebrew literature, the prophet sent a stake through the heart of the idea that the goal of human life is the striving after happiness. According to the Aristotelian ideal, eudaimonia or happiness was the ultimate goal in human life. Rather than searching for the fulfillment of human potential and personal excellence, Isaiah understood the true purpose of life to be a mission of love.
Isaiah had a height of moral grandeur and a conception of history that the greatest of Greek philosophers cannot match. Yet we still have not touched on the deepest question troubling the prophet: the basis for the free forgiveness of Israel’s sins, and the way in which the adamic spirit could be finally transformed.