Isaiah 62:1-5 Commentary

Embarrassingly Loved

If you blush easily, prepare yourself for this week’s lectionary text out of Hebrew Scripture!  After all the desolations of the early chapters of Isaiah, we saw the turn last week with Isaiah 43.  Less than 20 chapters later, reading Scripture can feel almost like eavesdropping the sweet nothings of young lovers or stumbling upon an old (and rather graphic) love letter.

In verse one, God is personified as a young lover who jumps up on a park bench to shout a declaration of love to anyone in earshot.  God will not love us secretly.  God is not ashamed of us.  Like a groom with a beautiful bride on his arm or young parents eager to show off the remarkable child in their arms.  God is delighted in us.

It is incredibly important to take time with a text like this one.  Consider how often our preaching waxes on and on and on about human sin, depravity, failure and weakness.  This text is no less true and therefore deserving of the same amount of airtime in our preaching. This week we have a joyful task in our sermons: to let God’s people know how very loved they are! So embarrassingly loved that it might even make you blush to think about it.

Double Entendre

If you haven’t blushed yet, here it comes.  Isaiah moves from a public declaration of love to the most intimate kind of love.  The English modestly translates “as a young man marries a young woman, so will your Builder marry you.” However, the Hebrew uses a much more direct verb. Not “marry” but “beds.” Biblical scholar Robert Alter writes, “Most translations render it as ‘espoused,’ but that is too formal and too decorous…it has a sexual connotation: Zion, the woman who has been forsaken, will now enjoy consummation again. The sexual implication of the term is clearly suggested in verse 5.”

While I imagine the context in which you preach will dictate how far down this line of thinking you find it reasonable and responsible to go (i.e. you don’t want upset parents contacting you about the questions raised from the backseat of the car on the ride home from church,) you cannot domesticate or tame this text. God’s love for us is not prudish, restrained, prim or stuffy. In this text, we can draw no other conclusion except that God’s love is lavish and unashamed, as we see in the name changes just preceding this portion of the text.

What’s in a Name?

What is the story behind your name?  Is it a family name? From a bible story? A respected person in history or a beloved character in a novel?  Ask any soon-to-be parents pouring over lists of baby names, a lot goes into naming a child. Ask any soon-to-be married couples what it means for one or both to make a change to their names and you may get an earful! Other cultures around the world and throughout time have created rituals, milestones, coming-of-age rites related to naming or taking a new name. Robert Alter tells us that, in Jewish culture of the time, “the name was conceived as incorporating the essence of the person or object.”  He points specifically to Jacob wrestling with God and being renamed Israel (meaning “one who wrestles with God.”)

Here the name change portends a complete reversal of fortunes, from destitute to delightful, from unloved to beloved.  In the introduction to her recently published book, The Book of Belonging: Bible Stories for Kind and Contemplative Kids, Mariko Clark writes the following in her introduction:

“One of the most special things about learning stories from the Bible is that they teach us about who we are. We get to learn the names God has for us, the people God made. The more we read the Bible, the more names we will learn. There are three big names that seem really special to God, three that show up again and again in the stories we’ve shared here:

Belonging

Beloved

Delightful”

While all three show up in this week’s lectionary readings, in fact seem to dance off the pages in the Psalms and Isaiah readings especially, this idea of God’s people being named delightful is often missing from our own self-awareness.  Clark writes,

“You make God happy, just by being you. Before we did anything or said anything, God was delighted with us. But we often forget, and it trips us up! So the Bible is full of stories of God reminding people that they don’t need to earn God’s delight or hide when they make mistakes. They just have to trust God says that they Belong, they are Beloved, and they are Delightful.”

Illustration:

In the opening chapters of L.M. Montgomery’s beloved classic, Anne of Green Gables, we meet a young orphaned girl, full of rapturous dreams and agile imagination, on her way to what she believes will be her forever home.  However, when she arrives, she is thrown from the highest of hopes to the “depths of despair” to learn that Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert had, in fact, asked for a boy to be sent and had no intention of keeping a girl.  Stern Marilla shakes the child out of her bevy of tears by asking what seemed to sensible Marilla a fairly straight-forward question, “What’s your name?”  Only to find herself engaged in the following back-and-forth:

“Will you please call me Cordelia?”

“Call you Cordelia! Is that your name?”

“No-o-o-o, it’s not exactly my name, but I would love to be called Cordelia. It’s such a perfectly elegant name.”

“I don’t know what on earth you mean. If Cordelia isn’t your name, what is?”

“Anne Shirley … but oh, please do call me Cordelia. It can’t matter much to you what you call me if I’m only going to be here a little while, can it? And Anne is such an unromantic name.”

“Unromantic fiddlesticks! … Anne is a good plain sensible name. You’ve no need to be ashamed of it.”

“Oh, I’m not ashamed of it, only I like Cordelia much better … but if you call me Anne please call me Anne spelled with an e.”