January 19 2020
Is 49:3, 5-6; 1 Cor 1:1-3; John 1:29-34
Brookdale
Today’s first reading comes from the book of Isaiah. Chapters 40-66 of that book are addressed to Jews in captivity in Babylon, somewhere around 540-550 BC. Just imagine how things looked to those captives. They had been in Babylon for almost fifty years. Many of the Jews who originally walked the 1700 miles from Jerusalem to Babylon had died, and these were actually their children or grandchildren. They had never seen Israel, but they knew that the city of Jerusalem had been destroyed and God’s temple demolished. These weren’t immigrants. They were demoralized members of a godforsaken people. To their neighbors and themselves, they were losers.
Isaiah comes to them with a message of comfort and hope. The speaker in our first reading seems to be sometimes Isaiah the prophet and sometimes the people of Israel. Speaking as Israel, he says: “The LORD said to me: You are my servant, Israel, through whom I show my glory.” At this point, Israel might well think that God has a very strange way of showing his glory. He allowed his holy places to be desecrated and his people driven out from the land he promised to them. He allowed David’s line of kings to be shamefully extinguished. Or rather, the Babylonians apparently did all that in spite of God.
But Isaiah says that God “formed me as his servant from the womb, that Jacob may be brought back to him and Israel gathered to him.” Jacob was the original name of the patriarch Israel, so Isaiah is saying that God will bring the exiles back to the holy land and gather them to Himself. This sounds like the promise of a new exodus, a repeat of the time when God rescued his people from slavery in Egypt and brought them to the promised holy land.
Isaiah goes on to say God shows his glory by making his people glorious: “I am made glorious in the sight of the LORD, and my God is now my strength!” So God is still Lord and will show his strength in a new exodus. The people who have been praying and waiting for this for decades can take heart.
At this point, if Isaiah were a television salesman, he might have said, “But wait! There’s more!”: “It is too little, the LORD says, for you to be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and restore the survivors of Israel.” Too little? This probably seemed to the captives like more than they could ever possibly hope for. They have no army, no power, and no friends, and their homeland is a ruin.
Still, God promises them an even brighter future than the return home: “I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” That’s God’s promise to this “loser” people who seemed to have no future. It’s not without cost to them; they will have to walk 1700 miles back to Jerusalem and rebuild. But they will be free.
Release from captivity was almost unimaginable at the time, but that’s what happened. Cyrus of Persia conquered the Babylonians, set the captives free, and helped them return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. Israel never became a great power, but through its influence on Christianity and Islam it did become a light to the nations—even during the many centuries when there was no nation of Israel.
What does this mean for us today? Who are we in this story? Well, for one thing, we are the nations at the ends of the earth, who have seen God’s glory. And we are God’s servants too, called on to manifest His glory in our own lives, and to be a light to everyone we meet. As Christians, we do this by sharing God’s compassion with all of his creatures. After all, if the hopeless captive Judeans of 540 BC could manifest God’s glory, surely we can show some part of it.