permission pending from Steve Coffey

1.  What do you see here, if anything, that speaks of re-imaging God?

I found myself thinking of the 2020 movie Minari as a possible lens to see the text through. In a nutshell, in this movie a young immigrant family finds themselves in something of a self-made exile. With desires for a better life, they relocate to the midwest to seek their dreams but we soon see differing intentions with their best efforts leading to rot and their relationship in shambles. You could interpret these sour consequences as God’s judgement on their willful, ‘greedy’ actions. When the climax arrives, one assumes that all is lost. It just seems natural that humans would project bitter pills as this as God’s judgement on them. 

But that isn’t where the story in the movie ends - nor the story in the Isaiah text. We’re not shown how the dots appear but they lead to a new beginning. So too, it seems the Isaiah text points to God bringing a hopeful new beginning.  

In the new testament, the disciples encounter the resurrected Jesus who helps them see that his suffering and the resurrection are a fulfillment of the scriptures. The disciples slowly come to see (re-imagine) how the scriptures have pointed to this all along. Could this Isaiah text be one such example of God’s promise to ‘create all things new’? “When life has been shattered through tragedy and heartache, through sin and failure, the only hope for any future lies in what God alone can do and in our response to him.” (the Voice Commentary)

— Verda

First of all Cal, Linda, Wade & I are going through the book Living Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson. It is interesting how each of the 3 synoptic gospels use the same source material and general story arc, but narrate their account in different ways in order to get their main point across. The sequence of events may differ, some stories are omitted altogether, and the portrayal of the characters (eg. the disciples) fluctuates from one gospel to another. They re-imagine their source material in ways that benefit their point of view. “Jesus as the mystery of the kingdom in Mark demands not understanding but fidelity in following the path of suffering he walks. In Matthew, Jesus as teacher of the church and personified Torah asks disciples to have an understanding heart as well as faithful obedience. In Luke's story, the disciples play still another role - as prophetic successors” (which will open the kingdom to the Gentiles and the whole world). 

This is a long introduction in which to say that each of the Biblical authors has a main theme that they're trying to get across. In Isaiah, with his images of flourishing nature and long-awaited deliverance, the author seems to be re-describing the God of creation and the God of the exodus into the present situation of the exile. In the angry, furious depictions, we see echoes of the God of the Torah who hates oppression and disloyalty to God and to his creation. Brueggemann mentions one difference in this account from the Exodus account in that the people don't have to flee, but are instead escorted in a royal procession to their beloved land. Apart from the new setting, and confident tone, there seems to be little "personal growth" from the time of the Egypt narratives with regard to the depiction of a God who wavers between fury and intense love and compassion. Which brings me to my next reflection.

— Penny

2.  How do you configure divine wrath in a way that is restorative and not punitive? Is wrath even a ’thing’ today?

In studying our next Moltmann chapter ("The Cosmic Christ”), I have been very intrigued by his description of the "hovering of God over creation" in Genesis as being more correctly translated as a "vibrating". This vibration is the "song of creation" which brings all things into being: "So the Creator differentiates his creatures through his creative Word and joins them through his spirit . . . like a cosmic liturgy and a music of the spheres."  

So what does this have to do with Isaiah?  This may be a really crazy thought but I had the idea that maybe the continual rapid movement between opposite portrayals (anger/love, jealousy/steadfastness, abundance/destruction, etc) creates a kind of life giving energy for the reader if the passages are read as intended. 

For example, if this prophetic liturgy is, like Brueggemann often states, poetry, then the cadence or rhythm and contrast between the words and stanzas might build a momentum that could lead to creative change. Just like the "page turning" narratives in Revelation were meant to encourage the persecuted and to inspire faithfulness in the lukewarm, maybe the repetitive page-turning narratives of Isaiah have a similar purpose. 

It's interesting that scientists are beginning to work with the idea that "all things in our universe are constantly in motion, vibrating . . . and ultimately all matter is just vibrations of various underlying fields." In art too, without the contrast of light and dark, sharp and soft edges, large and small, in repeated patterns, there is not much scope for exploration or beauty. It's hard to square this with the goodness of God, but maybe the Isaiah passages are not about that as much as they are calls to live wide awake in the world, and fashion your days in faithfulness to a God who loves you. The evolving portrait of God will come to its centre in Christ. As others have said, the image of Isaiah's suffering servant is reimagined into Jesus who not only loves and delivers the sick and the lost, but weeps for and suffers because of the wayward creation. I am reminded of one of my favourite verses, Romans 8:38-39, with its fluctuation between opposites:  38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[k]neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

- Penny

I am getting fed up with the Yahweh that appears in Isaiah. Our passage today is trying to be uplifting: “Look I’m going to take the cup of suffering from you!” But wasn’t this the same Yahweh who decanted the wine of wrath in the first place? If I was an Israelite in Babylon I wouldn’t be too keen on trusting this good news. What will He do if I screw up again? This wrath and punishment business is overrated. I’m tired of worrying about whether I measure up to God’s standards. Aren’t we all just doing our best to keep our heads above water? 

There is a way of seeing these passages and the Exile as a necessary purifying. I get that. We suffer the consequences of our unconscious or rebellious decisions. But I’m starting to find the understanding of Sin as incompleteness more compelling. Because when we truly understand the consequences of our actions in the presence of love we find our desires changing. “Yesterday I thought like a child...” kind of a thing. So I think one of the things being purged through Isaiah is Israel’s neglect of the marginal among them. I understand that God would be sorrowful about that. I just wish the prophet could tone down the judgementalism! 

It was helpful to think how Jesus might interpret our passage. Jesus never condemned people who were weary or overburdened. Take his response to Zaccheus, a tax collector no less. Jesus seemed to be more interested in getting ordinary folks connected to his Abba. “Come unto me who are weary...my burden is light.”

This ties in with an experience I had recently. I’m leery to call it deliverance; time will tell. But it was impactful. I’ve been trying to understand why I am so irrationally afraid of Covid. I understand Covid is an objective fearful thing, but I rarely go out and work from home; I’m very low risk. And I can be fine for awhile and then be hit with anxiety. 

In talking to Paul I decided to ask God for an answer, but expectantly. So I had to turf the Isaiah God. I had to pray to the Pieta God or Jesus’ God. I realize I can’t fix this in any way on own. The answer needs to come beyond. “This is on you God. It’s in your court” I prayed in my centering prayer. In the next few days I noticed a sense of space inside myself. A more observing stance which also felt like a presence. I wasn’t trying to do anything; I just found it appearing in me. A few days later I found myself  re-remembering being locked out of the house as a kid. The anxiety I felt that night was exactly like what I sometimes feel when chaos threatens. I made a vow that night to never again disobey my mom; I never wanted to feel that ungrounded and unsafe again. Somehow combined with that sense of space/presence, I found I didn’t feel shame about my neurotic responses. They just need to be healed and that’s on God. And this space/presence was the opposite of Isaiah God. Another layer of the onion has been peeled away, a step deeper into trusting. And funnily I heard the song from the TV series “The Detectorists” playing in my mind: “I’m waiting for you...”. 

— Linda

In reading this passage I had flashbacks to being a young evangelical, always guilty, dreading the day Jesus would come back and reveal every secret sin. There is never a time when I am not guilty of something, by commission or omission, so it creates paralyzing existential dread. It seems Yahweh is drunk with rage while the people stagger, caring more for his holy name than his people. All is sacrificed to this divine ego. A sarcastic paraphrase of the first part: “I was so angry so I burned your house to the ground and you nearly died in the flames, but I’m over it now so it’s Ok, I'll build you a new one. Be comforted, I’m going to set your cruel neighbour’s house on fire — let’s enjoy watching it burn while we draw up blueprints! Praise be to Me.” How do you trust, love, or worship a God like this? What kind of holy people rejoice at another’s destruction? It defames God and insults humanity.  

They say people have different love languages, and I imagine different eras have different love languages as well. An insightful person will know how to respond even of they don’t share the same language or the same historical context. I can speculate that a small vulnerable nation under geopolitical threat might need to understand love as dominating vengeful power rather than sacrificial suffering love. Both expressions can be configured as fidelity: God will fight for us, and indeed, even against us, but will never abandon us. This same fidelity finds its fullest expression in Jesus, who suffers for us, takes our evil into himself and transforms it. It think that its weakest expression in this kind of punitive, vengeful scapegoating tribalism (though it would not have felt weak to an ancient Israelite, I’m sure). 

I have suffered with misplaced anger and have caused suffering for others. Drilling down to it’s source, it is most often sadness, disappointment and impotency sublimated into anger. My anger points to what I care most deeply about, and therefore hides a great vulnerability. David Whyte in his excellent short essay on anger writes:

"Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body's incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the charity and breath of our whole being... Anger truly felt at its centre is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence."

Could this also be true of God, whose incoherent anger reveals his most vulnerable heart?

— Eldon

The Greek word for wrath is thymos: passion, anger, wrath or rage. In the Hebrew Bible, the work is hemah. In the Latin authors, wrath has a root of smoke or steam. Wrath or anger is related in Hebrew to the nose and the moisture produced when enraged. We encounter the word for wrath relatively early in Job, which makes the connection between anatomy and emotion clear: “When God breathes deeply, they perish; by a breath of his nostril, they are annihilated.” (Job 4:9) Throughout the Hebrew Bible, there is a distinction between justified or righteous anger and uncontrollable human emotion. Moses expresses righteous anger at the Israelites during the Calf-dancing episode.

Jeremiah asks that he be filled with God’s righteous rage at the people’s disobedience.

But I’m filled with the LORD’s rage
and am tired of holding it in.
Pour it out on the children in the streets
and on the youths gathered together;
husband with wife will be trapped,
as will those old and gray. (Jeremiah 6:11)

When we turn from human to divine rage, things get more drastic. God’s anger is predicated on his outraged holiness.

Assyria punished
Look there! The LORD is coming from far away;
his anger blazing, his smoke-cloud thick.
His lips are full of fury;
his tongue is like a devouring fire. (Isaiah 30:27)

Anger or wrath is expressed with images of lips, smoke fire. One of the strangest expressions of God’s anger directed toward is servants comes from the oldest portion of Scripture, concerning God’s intentions toward Moses:

During their journey, as they camped overnight, the LORD met Moses and tried to kill him. (Exodus 4:24)

This verse comes without reference to Moses's transgression; it comes out of nowhere, so to speak. Most occasions of God’s wrath involve disobedience to the covenant and God’s response to idolatry. Here’s a particularly harsh expression from Numbers. 

Israel became attached to the Baal of Peor, and the LORD was angry at the Israelites. The LORD said to Moses: Take all the leaders of the people and kill them on behalf of the LORD in broad daylight, so that the LORD’s anger turns away from Israel. (Numbers 25:3)

Within the context of the covenant, wrath is an expression of wounded love. Wounded love awakens God’s wrath. In Isaiah, God’s wrath is poured out and causes its recipients to become disoriented and downright drunk; it has such strong potency. Fortunately, God’s wrath has a limit and eventually turns back to love when exhausted. “In an outburst of rage, I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting love, I have consoled you, says your redeemer, the LORD...The mountains may shift, and the hills may be shaken, but my faithful love won’t shift from you, and my covenant of peace won’t be shaken, says the LORD, the one who pities you. (Isaiah 54:8,10).

Whenever I exploded in wrath, it related to one of my values being demeaned or dishonored - or that my authenticity and integrity were questioned. Just like the god of ancient Scripture, I have snorted and steamed, lashing out with a tendency toward destruction. Is the god that exits genuinely like this? Is god humanity writ large? I doubt it.

God is not like me. I expect God to act restoratively, which I can believe includes a certain degree of concentrated discipline. I don’t expect God to lose control or become bull-like. The result of God’s anger should not be to send us sinful human beings reeling, drunken with fear, and placed in a position of annihilation.

If I am on track and God isn’t like that, how does God deal with covenant-breaking and rebellion? A new age has come, a unique expression of God’s sorrow and hurt is conveyed on the Cross. Jesus, the human face of God revealed to us, has decided to respond to sin by forgiveness and empowerment. He has borne our transgression and taken our iniquities upon himself. When I contemplate the cross, I see abundant love for ignorant people like myself, who tend to step outside of God’s covenant intention for me and to even ignore God’s personhood and presence - for the most part of my conscious life. Here God is wounded and sorrowful at the mess I have made, but he repairs me and liberates me to live differently as I participate in his grace and step into his Spirit’s empowerment. Wrath still exists, but now, instead of projecting it on God, I realize that it was my wrath that caused God’s pain. God’s response to this comes via an intense love and a therapeutic correction.  

— Paul

3.  What do you think Jesus made of this passage?

I imagine that Jesus knew this text. I think he would have seen in the statements of wrath a reflection of God’s passionate care for God’s people. It’s like the George Macdonald quote about how God is always for us even when he is against us. But I think Jesus would have reframed this wrath in some ways. We can still see Jesus being angry as when he clears the temple or when he critiques the rulers about how their rules exclude the marginal. I think his desire was for the inclusion of all people and so his anger was directed at those that excluded others from the traditional means of accessing God. 

 Richard Beck’s latest blog posts have been about Leviticus and how Jesus radically changed the purity laws of his time. “Specifically, contamination generally obeys the law of negativity dominance. That is, when the clean and unclean, or the pure or the polluted, come into contact the negative dominates over the positive. The clean becomes unclean and the pure becomes polluted.

The law of negativity dominance creates a quarantine logic. Given the power of the pollutant, we maintain states of purity by distance and withdrawal. As we are now intimately familiar with, this the logic of social distancing and sheltering in place. 

Of course, social distancing makes sense in the world of a pandemic, but when imported into the moral and social domains--where people are deemed "unclean"--social distancing becomes a huge obstacle to acts of welcome, inclusion, hospitality and love. 

What we see in the gospels is Jesus transgressing against the rules of social distancing. Jesus breaks quarantine to touch and share community with the unclean. And yet, when Jesus does this, something surprising happens. The law of negativity dominance is reversed. In the event of contact Jesus doesn't become unclear n. Instead, Jesus purifies the unclean. Rather than a contagious pollution we experience a contagious holiness.”

 Just as Jesus demonstrated a contagious holiness I think he related a contagious empowerment. I think one of the things the prophet Isaiah is grappling with is the people’s inability to stay faithful and true in their relationship with God. I don’t think that we as moderns are any more faithful than our ancient ancestors but we have a sense that because of Jesus and the cross God is no longer holding our sins against us. God in Jesus is making us clean and empowering us to be faithful through the gift of his Spirit. 

I think of the verse from Hebrews that says that God will never leave us or forsake us. (Hebrews 13:5) I think that Jesus’s incarnation was an indication of God’s abiding love for his people and a sense that God would never leave or forsake them. It ties into the last verse of our text for this week about God going before us and coming behind us. 

— Cal

What would Jesus have made of getting drunk on the cup of wrath, bowls full of staggering, a lost yet chosen people rudderless, dislocated, left to the outskirts without a light to guide them through this very dark and long night of exile? No hand to hold, trapped in the vice of devastation, destruction, famine and sword—seemingly without regard. “Who will grieve with you? Who will comfort you?” Such a mocking question to such obvious glaring suffering.

I imagine the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount grieved at such a display of cruelty. Surely this is not the same God that he had come to call “Abba”? Wasn’t he anointed for this very thing? To comfort those who had lost everything, and weep with the sorrowful?  Didn’t the people he attract through his healing and his teachings share the same poverty of spirit as their wandering relatives? Surely some who followed him to the Mount were impoverished by rebelliousness, deceit and idolatry, like so many refugees that had gone before them. Instead of turning them away, Jesus invited them to sit closer as he spoke words of hope into of mournful existence. 

He saw them hunger and thirst for a new life of faithfulness because wandering after false gods had done them in. But instead of raging, Jesus invited them to step on a new path. He took to heart “Blessed are the merciful” and so no more litany of curses. Instead he listened to the wisdom of the spirit, offering the desperate and marginalized a liturgy of beatitudes instead.

I think authentic re-imagining of our God image and our faith narrative can only found when we are in relationship, the kind Jesus models for us. Because of his intimacy with the Father, Jesus knew that justice, reconciliation and the vision for a new society of mercy was at the heart of God’s passion – from day one, forever and always.Jesus was changing imaginations when he passed on the beatitudes. He spoke of purity in new ways. Rather than rigorous, weighty tribal rites done out of fear to a pantheon of wrathful gods, Jesus was moving them from external religiosity to a space of mutual interaction. Instead of daunting temples, Jesus invited them into a household where blessings of grace, truth, liberation and right action are shared and celebrated.

Through the benevolence of spirit, we can see past the tribal and cultural constructs of who God is. The fruit of this is that our hearts and imaginations live towards becoming pure as God’s heart is pure. This changes everything. Jesus, in his dedication to loving the God who is Abba blows apart the impulse to pass on wrath and suffering. The cup of wrath that was once forced on the enemy is replaced by Jesus's offer to drink the cup of suffering. It is because of the love shared between Father and Son, that Jesus can rewrite the retributive texts that feel so coercive. “But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you… Matthew 5:44

— Bev

4.  Name a time in your life (or in the life of your community) when you were delivered by ‘God’ out of trouble.

I remember a road trip I took in college with my somewhat unreliable car. Me and three friends left Edmonton late in the day and were heading to Vancouver. I seem to recall the car dying around 100 miles in and it being at least -20. It was dark out. Maybe midnight? The details are a little fuzzy. 

We had no cell phones and did not know what to do. We looked in the trunk for whatever we could find to stay warm and miracle of miracles we found a candle and some matches. I honestly think that saved our lives! One little candle lit kept us warm for hours.

I guess someone must've driven by at some point because we ended up getting into town and having the car towed to get the alternator fixed. I remember going bowling while we were waiting and then carrying on with the trip! 

It seems hard for me to think God saved us. So if we did not have that candle and no one had driven by, God wasn't looking out for us? But there is also no way I had a roadside survival safety kit ready to go. I was not that responsible at 18. 

I think more interesting is that this memory has come to me in dark times in my 40s. When I picture the candle warming the car of me and my close friends it brings such joy to my heart and makes me feel like I am not alone.

Light in the darkness is powerful imagery! 

— Mel

In 2012, I was a colossal failure at trying to forgive someone. For a year or more, I’d been in anguish because a family member had stopped talking to me. I was angry at being misunderstood, but working hard at forgiving, and prayed the Lord’s Prayer with them in mind, imagining them as God’s beloved child. But no matter what I did, my anger kept sneaking up on me, taking over any forgiveness I could muster. I began begging God to deliver me from this all-consuming anger at being misunderstood. It was like a wormwood in my heart. How could I let it go?

On June 4 of that year, Lyle was away golfing with Eldon at the cabin, and as I got up to go to work, a pileated woodpecker came to our upstairs feeder. I’d hardly ever seen this magnificent bird, let alone in my yard 3 feet from my window. I can’t explain it, but as soon as I saw it, it was a clear marker to me that my conflict was resolved. It felt like a vision from God, saying to me that now is a new time. Something changed in me. I felt God melted the anger in me. The obsession stopped and forgiveness came. A few weeks later, the silent treatment ended and we reconnected.

I had looked up the “spiritual meaning of a woodpecker” and learned that when the woodpecker comes tapping out an important message. In the words of our passage, maybe that woodpecker was tapping out the message: “Rouse yourself, rouse yourself!” or “Awake, awake!”. Perhaps it was also saying the other double verb of our passage, “Depart, depart!” In other words, don’t cling to her as my home, like Israel leaving exile. 

I’ll never forget the woodpecker’s gift.

— Lydia

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