Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13) Commentary

Illustration:

It Doesn’t Get Better Than This

As a graduate student, I am currently in a season of studying for my comprehensive exams. A couple months ago, I took my reading lists, a calendar and opened a brand new spreadsheet on my computer. I took the afternoon to create a weekly calendar and scheduled my reading.  I used a pleasant-to-look-at font, color-coded the spreadsheet, leaned back in my desk chair to observe a thing of great beauty. Everything pristine, unsullied by scheduling snafus, dropped assignments and unanticipated hiccups in the perfectly curated map of my next 6 months. I thought to myself, “It will never be any better than it is right now.”

I think about the way we prepare for things, the rituals we add to the start of new ventures: ordinations, weddings, inaugurations, convocations. On the one hand, they serve their own purpose as a good excuse for celebration. On the other hand, when the task ahead gets complicated, the relationship wearying, or the coursework overwhelming — you look back and find strength from where it all started and that’s what keep you going.

I imagine that a prophet’s commissioning must function something like that, especially because the task is daunting at the best of times and precarious all the rest of the times. By all accounts, Isaiah had a terrible job. For that reason, I am grateful he had such a dazzling commissioning.

Commentary:

A Fever Dream of Imagery

Just as in a dream, where disparate pieces of our life merge and we find ourselves plotting a heist with an elementary school teacher, your high school bully and an ex-boyfriend (just me?) Isaiah’s commissioning grabs imagery from all across Scripture, Jewish tradition and the culture of the day. God is enthroned in the Temple. The throne is an artifact of a ruler’s palace and the altar belongs, properly to the Temple. According to Robert Altar, the word used here for Temple can also be used for a palace and the conflation intends to communicate something about Heaven as a place where the reigning King is God and God is a reigning King. The Seraphim are mysterious creatures, with a name that seems to evoke the word for burning as well as the word for snakes, creatures that are known precisely for their lack of feet, which is a feature specifically referenced in the description. But whatever they are, they are winged and full of praise.

Dragging his Feet

The thing about a prophet is that, at some point, they have to say something. Over and over again in Scripture, this presents a challenge. Moses was a stutterer. Jeremiah complained of the same malady. In a potential double-meaning here by Isaiah, Alter suggests that “I am undone” might be translated just as faithfully as “I am struck dumb.” What is unique here, however, is that Isaiah doesn’t just claim that he isn’t up to the task because of his own weakness. Sure he has impure lips but also “I live among a people of unclean lips.” Here you can almost feel his feet dragging on their way to ordination.

And with that, the angel doesn’t wash his mouth out with soap — one might have preferred that solution. The angel raises a burning coal to his lips. Rather than washing away guilt, it is burned away. Notice a linguistic result of this encounter is that the text shifts from a prose format to poetic verse. Alter explains, “poetry, purportedly representing divine speech, is the prophet’s vehicle; now with his lips purified, he is in a condition to utter this elevated and powerful form of speech.”

The Bearer of Bad News

If we continue with the optional reading, God calls and Isaiah answers and then God gives him his first assignment: to declare that the people won’t hear, perceive or understand. And it will be their own fault, the failure of their own calloused hearts. Which is a bummer because if they did hear and perceive and understand, they would be changed and healed.

What a strange and confusing thing for God to tell Isaiah to tell the people. It isn’t hard to see they wouldn’t like the message and would almost certainly despise the messenger for bringing it. Interpretively, it is also strange to think that God would want to communicate to God’s people that their case is hopeless and God has no intention of helping them.

Altar offers a rather provocative solution to that problem by suggesting that this is Isaiah’s summary of God’s message, tainted by his own “quite realistic fear that his prophetic mission is doomed to failure from the outset, that all his exhortations will not move the people to turn back.”

This idea is further substantiated by his question in verse 11. “How long?” Isaiah wants to know how long the punishment will last. Might he be able to offer some good news, some hope, in this process? Unfortunately, the answer is not a hopeful one, though it does set us up for the prophecies in Isaiah chapters 7, 9 and 11, which are probably still lodged in your minds from Advent. Even when there is no interim good news to share, there is a Savior coming.