A Hope of Woe

(c) Katherine E. Brown

And I said, ‘Woe to me! I am lost! For a man of unclean lips am I, and in the midst of a people of unclean lips I dwell, yet the King, the LORD of Hosts, my eyes have seen!’

Isaiah 6:5 [see Isaiah 6:1-13, NRSVUE]

In this season of headlines blaring crises and woe, I am avoiding Isaiah 6. It is unnerving to read of cities laid waste and houses uninhabited and the ground (‘adamah’) itself desolate, burned-over, bereft of its God-banished humans (‘adam’). It is unnerving to read of this expected destruction when the headlines seem to report so much of the same: not thoughtful husbandry of resources, careful culling of dead trees or pruning of unhealthy growth, but the slash and burn of an entire forest, heedless of where trees and branches fall, uncaring that the damage ripples beyond the immediate crash. Is there no good to nurture? In our time? In Isaiah’s? Where is the end? What is the goal?

To my ear, God’s tone is implacable. The LORD does not bluster but aims straight towards God’s end. Calls for someone to go, to proclaim, and thereby to accomplish, the hardening of people’s hearts and eyes and ears, lest they should see and hear and understand and turn again to the LORD (Isa 6:9-10), the LORD who is source of healing (Exod 15:26).

How is it that God should want to prevent this? Should call for one willing to be the agent of this hardening? Does the prophet know what he is volunteering for? He cried ‘Woe!’ in seeing his sin — starkly visible in the light of God’s holiness — and, reading, I realize the prophet’s cry is not undone by the touch of that hot coal, seraph-carried to his lips. The coal comes with the word that his sin is covered over, his iniquity turned away, but not that there is no more “woe!’ For when the prophet, purified and emboldened to speak in divine counsel, hears the task for which he has just offered himself, he cries out again: ‘Until when?’ (Isa 6:10). And learns that the work is longer than his lifetime, is a work that he himself will not accomplish, nor see accomplished. It is a work larger than human possibility.

Is this why the LORD reserves it to God-self, forecloses the possibility of premature return? Lest the people, turning, imagine that they have cleansed themselves, healed themselves, can be trusted with total control? Those who join house to house and field to field (Isa 5:8), who “acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of his right” (Isa 5:23) — these may share a portion of what they call their own, may make edits around the edges and imagine it is their righteousness working. As if individual acts of compassion are sufficient substitute for just society. Not them. We, us. For this, too, is part of the passage: the prophet does not cry his first woe in repudiation of others’ sin but in recognition of his own, and in kinship with his people. Isaiah’s glimpse of God gave him truer sight of himself: not one set apart from his nation’s sinfulness but one who has a part in it. Isaiah is convicted to speak of himself and people as one, and seemingly stricken with equal parts horror and awe, Isaiah cries Woe! That recognition — not ‘them’ but ‘we ourselves’ — begins the process of cleansing, allows Isaiah to speak to God, and after that, to speak for God. Even as hard word spoken judged Isaiah as much as the earth’s kings to whom he was subject.

We cannot save ourselves. God knows this. Isaiah learns this. In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw The King, the LORD of hosts. Isaiah has seen and spoken with The King, yet Isaiah cannot prevent Uzziah’s grandson Ahaz from right-sizing his foreign policy, piously refusing to rely on God (Isa 7), sending to the foreign empire Assyria for aid. Isaiah cannot keep Judah’s king, who should have been as ‘son’ to God (Psalm 2), submitting to be ‘son and servant’ to Assyria’s king (2 Kings 16:7), setting a foreign altar in God’s own sanctuary (2 Kings 16:10-16).

Isaiah cannot prevent any of this. Isaiah’s work, it turns out, is not to prevent it (lest Isaiah imagine that his work was effective to save?) but to prophesy nonetheless. To proclaim what fidelity looks like, to decry injustice and evil and oppression — even to write a record of the protest, of the call, of the need for God, and to seal that writing as a sign to the future (Isa 8). That seal signs both that the people did not, could not, save themselves, and the seal signs that there will be salvation.

Our burning-over is destruction. God’s burning-over leads to new seeds opening. The proclamation meanwhile is part of the work. I am not expected accomplish it; I am not excused from proclaiming it. It is my work to acknowledge my sinful part in the larger human ‘we’ (not us/them, but only us, all of us ‘like God,’ but not ourselves God). Recognize that kinship, cry out the Woe!, then attest to the possibilities that God intends.

Isaiah sees the LORD’s presence filling the house, the LORD’s glory filling the earth, and writes the vision so that others too can be filled. Filled with awareness of God’s holiness, awareness of our lack, and awareness that there is work to which we are summoned beyond that first Woe! Work which may fill us with, and for, God.