Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 33-35 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 30)

Isaiah 33 – Woe to the plunderer who has never been plundered himself. They will suffer what they have inflicted on others. “He who acts with integrity, who speaks sincerely and rejects extortionate profit, who waves away bribes from his hands, shuts suggestions of murder out of his ears and closes his eyes against crime; this man will dwell in the heights, he will find refuge in a citadel built on rock” (33:15-16).

Isaiah 34 – A prophesy about the end of Edom. Yahweh is angry with all the nations and has “marked them down for slaughter” (34:2). The land is “drenched with blood” (34:7) and “it shall lie waste age after age” (34:10). Over it “Yahweh will stretch the measuring line of chaos and the plumb-line of emptiness” (34:11).

Isaiah 35 – An ironic word – “Look, your God is coming, vengeance is coming, the retribution of God; he is coming to save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unsealed, then the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongues of the dumb sing for joy” (35:4-5). Those Yahweh ransoms shall return to Zion “shouting for joy” (35:10).

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 30

Another “Quaker notion” that can be found in Catholic spirituality is the idea of “continuing revelation”. I have mentioned it several times. In a way, Catholics understood continuing revelation way before Quakers ever entered the scene. They simply called it tradition. Tradition and continuing revelation are grounded in the same belief—that God is not an artifact of history. He is as active today in the lives of his faithful as he was in the lives of the holy men and women of old, the ones we read about in the Bible. And he is active in the corporate life of his church, just as he was active in the creation of the universe, the history of his chosen people, and in the life of his Son. His wisdom is not confined to the Scriptures, though they are a product of his Spirit in a uniquely helpful way. But the men and women of Scripture are just men and women like us. God’s Spirit led and opened truth to them, and it does to us as well—not everyone in the same measure, but everyone nevertheless. We could not know God at all unless we had his Spirit in us:

“These things [things that are part of God’s wisdom] God

has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches

everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10).

But continuing revelation is not just an individual phenomenon, not even mainly an individual phenomenon. It is primarily corporate. It is something the gathered people work out together over time, not something any one believer can definitively discern. When Christ promises that the Advocate will be sent to teach the disciples everything (John 14:26), it is possible to interpret this as applying to each one individually, but it makes more sense to see it as a promise that runs to the group, to the body they will become together. Clearly it did not take long for the church to hold that the guidance of the Holy Spirit Christ bestowed upon them belonged in some more reliable sense to the corporate body and in particular to its bishops than it did to individual members (not that individual members could not claim a measure of this same spiritual guidance). So when the church set out to discern truth in controversial areas such as the conflict between Hebrew and Hellenic Jews at the First Council of Jerusalem, it was a corporate task, not an individual one. Similarly, when controversy arose as to what writing Christians should look to as authoritative and which were to be given less weight, it was a council of the church that made the final judgment. That is how the Scriptures most Protestants take as solely authoritative came to be assembled and canonized. It is on the authority of the councils and the church that organized them that the authority of Scripture must rest in the last analysis. Had the church as an institution lacked the guidance of the Spirit, one could hardly argue that the judgments of the councils they called should be respected.

Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 6-7 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism (Part 15)

Isaiah 6 – This chapter tells us the story of Isaiah’s call. It happened c. 740 BC. Isaiah says he “saw the Lord Yahweh seated on a high throne” (6:1). Two “seraphs” stood above him, each with six wings (two covered its face, two its genitals – here called feet – and two for flying). They cried out, “Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh Sabaoth [the Lord of Heaven’s Armies]” (6:3). “Their voices shook the Temple to its foundations, and the entire building was filled with smoke” (6:4).

Isaiah feels he is doomed. He calls himself “wretched” for being a “man of unclean lips” (6:5), a man who lives “among a people of unclean lips” (6:5). One of the seraphim comes to him and touches his mouth with a live coal to purge him of his sin. “Then I heard the Lord asking, ‘Whom should I send as a messenger to this people? Who will go for us?’ I said, ‘Here I am. Send me.’ And he said, ‘Yes, go, and say to this people, ‘Listen carefully, but do not understand. Watch closely, but learn nothing.’ Harden the hearts of these people. Plug their ears and shut their eyes, nor hear with their ears, not understand with their hearts and turn to me for healing” (6:8-10).

Isaiah wonders how long this state of things will last. God tells him they will remain unresponsive until “towns are empty, their houses are deserted, and the whole country is a wasteland” (6:11). If even a remnant remains, “it will be invaded again and burned” (6:13). The stump that remains “will be a holy seed” (6:13).

Isaiah 7 – During the reign of Ahaz, king of Judah, the king of Aram [Syria] plans to go against Jerusalem with Pekah, son of the king of Israel; they will not take the city, but the “hearts of the king and his people trembled with fear, like trees shaking in a storm” (7:2).

Isaiah is instructed to take his own son and go to Ahaz and tell him not to fear the assault. It will not succeed. And as for Israel, “within sixty-five years it will be crushed and completely destroyed” (7:8). Don’t forget that at this time, Israel and Judah are separate kingdoms; Israel will be the first to be conquered by the Assyrians.

A second message then is sent to Ahaz telling him to ask Yahweh for a sign, but Ahaz says he will not “put Yahweh to the test” (7:12). Then comes the famous prophecy: “The Lord himself will give you a sign. It is this: the maiden is with child and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call Immanuel” (7:14). This child will “know how to refuse evil and choose good” (7:15).

According to Lawrence Boadt, no book of the Old Testament was looked to as much as Isaiah in early Christian attempts to understand Jesus’ importance to them.

The “army of southern Egypt and . . . the army of Assyria . . . will swarm around you like flies and bees. They will come in vast hordes and settle in the fertile areas and also in the desolate valleys, caves, and thorny places” (7:18-19). But the Lord will also “hire a ‘razor’ from beyond the Euphrates River – the king of Assyria – and use it to shave off everything: your land, your crops, and your people” (7:20).

There will be little left to feed the people, but “few people will be left in the land” (7:22). “The entire land will become a vast expanse of briers and thorns, a hunting ground overrun by wildlife” (7:24).

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 15

The peace that came to me in submitting to this call to speak in Meeting was not lasting. We moved from Raleigh up to Asheville, North Carolina. I toyed with the idea of joining the Unitarian Universalists because they had a Sunday school program and more structure to their worship time – singing, corporate prayer, things I felt I needed and that would be good for my children. But the chaos that came with the breakup of my first marriage ultimately brought me back to the Quakers.

I needed something different. I needed the quiet and intimate sense of support and comfort I knew I would find among Friends. I needed to be able to pour my heart out and ask people to “hold me in the light.” I needed to reflect on what I had done to get myself into such a mess and ponder ways of getting out of it. Meeting gave me opportunities to do all these things. At some point after starting back, a man came up to me after Meeting and introduced himself to me. This man, who three years later would become my second husband, would become for me in this moment of my life an instrument of God’s grace. I didn’t realize it at first. We talked about the situation I was in, how I was holding up. He told me that he was also going through domestic turmoil. He said he was finding comfort in reading the Scriptures for the first time, looking to God in a way he had not been willing to do earlier in his life. He was excited about the prophets. They “spoke to his condition.” as Friends said.

I started to go to the weekly Bible study he had at his place. We got to know each other. We walked around his neighborhood or mine, talking about our problems, sharing our thoughts about religion. He had been raised a Catholic but had left the Catholic Church in college. He hadn’t lost faith entirely though. He continued to feel the pull of the divine, just not in terms of organized religion. Like many in the late sixties and early seventies, he found a degree of spiritual satisfaction in the back-to-nature movement that was big on American college campuses in those years. His hero was Henry David Thoreau. In the years since college, however, with his marriage and entry into the world of private school teaching, he had struggled with depression and felt the need to reattach himself to a spiritual community of some kind. Through a Quaker friend of his wife’s, he became interested in Friends and started attending a Meeting near the school where he was teaching. As with many people attracted to Friends during this period, the traditional Friends commitment to things like social justice, peace, and environmental responsibility weighed heavily with him, but he also loved the unadorned Christianity he met with there.

I was in a completely different place with respect to bother religion and my marital troubles. I was pretty much a mess, spiritually and psychologically. I had no sense of where I was going religiously at all. For years I had wrestled with feelings of nostalgia for the Church and what it represented to me, but my mind could not seem to find a way back. It wasn’t enough to yearn for faith or have an amorphous sense of a transcendent dimension to human life. These I could easily attribute to my psychological neediness. I was morbidly preoccupied with the state of my mind. I had separated, in part, out of a fear that my mind would not hold up over time to the unhappiness I experienced in that union, and what I was going through now made me even more afraid. I kept thinking of something I had read about Virginia Woolf and her descent into mental illness, about how it was like sensing sharks in the waters around her mind—the fear of its inevitability, the inner awareness that the attack was coming and that she was powerless to defend against it. I wanted to believe—now more than ever—but I just couldn’t. I was willing to concede that something “spiritual,” something we could not know distinctly but called God, might exist; but the whole Christian thing—the man Jesus, the miracles, his dying for our sins, the resurrection, the gospel, the church, the whole array of doctrines and moral mandates—all of this was simply beyond me.

I particularly remember one conversation my friend and I had about Jesus when he asked me what I thought about Jesus’ crucifixion. I said I couldn’t understand making so much of this one death, terrible as it was, that thousands of men had been crucified by the Romans and that people died all the time for love of others or for causes they thought worthy or good. There was nothing in that story that compelled me intellectually. It would be nice to be able to believe in it, but I couldn’t.

Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 3-5 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 14)

Isaiah 3 – Yahweh will take from Jerusalem and Judah all that supports it. “People will oppress each other – man against man, neighbor against neighbor. Young people will insult their elders, and vulgar people will sneer at the honorable” (3:5).

“They are doomed! They have brought destruction upon themselves” (3:9). The leaders of God’s people mislead them and oppress them. They grind the faces of the poor in the dust. Zion is compared to a beautiful but frivolous woman who is “haughty, craning her elegant neck, flirting with her eyes, walking with dainty steps” (3:16). On the day of judgment “the Lord will strip away everything that makes her beautiful” (3:18). “Instead of smelling of sweet perfume, she will stink” (3:24).

The men of the city will die by the sword. “The gates of Zion will weep and mourn. The city will be like a ravaged woman, huddled on the ground” (3:26).

Isaiah 4 – The devastation God intends will reduce the male population of the city so that there will be seven women vying for each man. But mixed with the prophecy of doom, a promise of restoration also is given. “The Lord will wash the filth from beautiful Zion and cleanse Jerusalem of its bloodstains . . . Then the Lord will provide shade for Mount Zion and all who assemble there. He will provide a canopy of cloud during the day and smoke and flaming fire at night, covering the glorious land” (4:4-5). 

Isaiah 5 - The prophet compares the city with a vineyard God has taken great efforts to plant. But the fruit of the vineyard has been sour. God will let the vineyard go unprotected and unnourished. “He expected a crop of justice, but instead he found oppression. He expected to find righteousness, but instead he heard cries of violence” (5:7).

God curses those guilty of these things: over-accumulation of property, drinking too much, thoughtlessness and inability to “see” the beauty of the creation, inability to discern good from bad, cheating those who are good, and turning the moral law on its head. To punish these sins, God will raise a “distant nation” (5:26) to punish them. Unlike this own, these people are not faint or weary. They are a disciplined horde.

We see here Isaiah’s insight into the fact that God’s plan involves all the nations of the world. Assyria (Sennacherib) is here an agent of God’s wrath. Isaiah insists that Israel should not try to get out of trouble by allying itself with powerful nations. When “His” kings continually fail to conduct themselves as He demands, Isaiah begins to turn his hopes to a future king “who would obey Yahweh” (Reading the Old Testament, 329) – the Messiah.

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 14

I became pretty regular in attending the Meeting. After a short time, something peculiar started to happen. I noticed that every time I went and sat down in the silence, my mind would drift to the words of the Eliot poem that had been religion to me for several years. It wasn’t surprising, I suppose, seeing how much in the poem had to do with stillness:

         At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

                 

Or

        

Words move, music moves

         Only in time; but that which is only living

         Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

         Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

         Can words or music reach

         The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

         Moves perpetually in its stillness.

In a way, the Meeting was a kind of embodiment of the poem, a place where the “intersection of the timeless with time” was palpable. I couldn’t call what I encountered here God yet, but I could call it “that of God”, as Quakers suggested. I didn’t understand it—that sense of something transcendent that plagued my mind. I didn’t feel comfortable with it. But I could not deny that it was something constant in my make-up or experience. The words evoking it began to seem like an obsession. Every time I came into Meeting, I could think of nothing else. It occurred to me at some point that this sense of preoccupation and agitation was what Friends meant by feeling moved to speak, but I didn’t feel ready. I didn’t have anything to say about the words, no erudite observations or points to make about them as people sometimes did with things they had read. Finally, after a year or so I just began to feel that I had to say the words to be rid of them. As I prepared to do it, my heart started to pound. In seconds it was pounding so hard I thought the palpitations must be visible. I looked around to see if anyone was staring at me, noticing my blouse move, but no. It crossed my mind that perhaps it was nerves, that I was anxious because I was going to stand up and speak in front of others, but that was silly. I knew everyone in Meeting well, and I wasn’t a shy person about speaking. I was a lawyer, for heavens sake. At last I spoke. I probably said the lines I have mentioned here, or others like them—lines that spoke of past and future being together in time present or spoke of the intersection of the timeless with time or about time being unredeemable and always present. I don’t know. But once the words passed my lips, they were gone. It was the only time I spoke in this Meeting. I didn’t connect the call to speak in any clear way with God or even “that of God,” I just thought of it as a psychological phenomenon—obsessive thoughts given release. Later I would realize and acknowledge that God had come to me in those words, that he had given me an experience of his presence and of “vocal ministry” as Quakers practice it, but I wasn’t yet ready to see it.

Daily Old Testament and Early Christian Writings: Leviticus 12-13 and Justin Martyr's First Apology 50-52

Leviticus 12 – Rules governing the “uncleanness” or ritual “pollution” surrounding childbirth.  For seven days after birth of a boy, the mother shall be deemed “unclean.”  After the circumcision on the 8^th day, 33 days must pass for her to be over the period of ritual pollution.  It is twice that time – sixty-six days – after the birth of a female child. 

At the end, she is to bring animals – a one-year-old lamb and a young pigeon or turtledove - for a holocaust offering (in thanksgiving) and a sin offering and the priest shall offer them up to make atonement and she shall be considered clean again.

Leviticus 13 – Skin problems of various kinds dealt with.  Leprosy shall make the person “unclean” ritually.  If it is not, the person may have to be quarantined for seven days and reexamined.  White hairs and penetration of sores beneath the skin are reasons for concern.  Even baldness is covered—it is fine unless he has pink spots too in which case there may be reason to suspect leprosy.  The leper shall dwell apart and cry out “unclean” so people will be warned.

There are 59 verses of intricate detail on how the sores are to be examined and evaluated over time.

Early Christian Writers

Justin Martyr (100-165 AD) – First Apology

His Humiliation Predicted

50 – The amazing lines of Isaiah’s prophecies about the humiliation Christ was to suffer are set forth at length: “He was despised, and of no reputation. It is He who bears our sins, and is afflicted for us; yet we did esteem Him smitten, stricken, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of peace was upon Him, by His stripes we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray; every man has wandered in his own way. And He delivered Him for our sins; and He opened not His mouth for all His affliction.”

He repeats the story of the apostles, clueless at the crucifixion, but revived at the resurrection when Christ came to them and “taught them to read the prophecies” they were so familiar with. It is the power of the Old Testament prophecies that gave momentum to the evangelization process.

The Majesty of Christ

51 – The translation here of Isaiah 8-12 is so hard to relate to, I have turned to another translation the NRSV: Still exploring the mysterious origins of Christ and the amazing way he “rules His enemies” he quotes the prophet Isaiah: “”By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet is was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through his the will of the Lord shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his through his knowledge. . . . because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the trangressors.”

And it was also prophesied that He would ascend into heaven both in Psalm 24 and in Daniel 7:13.

Certain Fulfillment of Prophecy

52 – If so much of what happened to Christ was predicted by the prophets and came true, Justin Martyr argues that we must expect that things prophesied, which have not yet come to pass WILL come to pass at some point.

“For the prophets have proclaimed two advents of His: the one, that which is already past, when He came as a dishonored and suffering Man; but the second, when, according to prophecy, He shall come from heaven with glory, accompanied by His angelic host, when also He shall raise the bodies of all men who have lived, and shall clothe those of the worthy with immortality, and shall send those of the wicked, endued with eternal sensibility, into everlasting fire with the wicked devils.”

Ezekiel says that at that time, “’very knee shall bow to the Lord, and every tongue shall confess Him.’” And the repentance of the Jews for not “getting it” will be fulfilled he seems to say: “Tribe by tribe they shall mourn, and then they shall look on Him whom they have pierced; and they shall say, Why, O Lord, hast Thou made us to err from Thy way” The glory which our fathers blessed, has for us been turned into shame.’” (quoting Zechariah and Isaiah).

What I don’t think a lot of “literalist” believers ask themselves is will believers be as clueless the second time as they were the first? People talk and talk about what the “Second Coming” will be like based on the words of prophesy, just as many of those who lived in Jesus’ time talked about the prophesies that the Messiah would restore the Davidic monarchy and bring an end to what we have come to call “the fall”; but that is what the split between Jews and Christians was all about – having completely different understandings of what the “coming” of the “Messiah” would be like. Turned out the ones who “got” the Christian “take” on what happened were those who had not grown up feeling they understood it all. It was the “outsiders” who “got it” if indeed we “got it” – I believe we did.

Daily Old Testament and Early Christian Writings: Leviticus 6 and Justin Martyr's First Apology 38-40

Leviticus 6 – If you sin against an associate or cheat or commit fraud or hold lost property instead of returning it to its owner. If you lie under oath or commit any act of dishonesty, you must give back what you owe or withheld and add to it a penalty of 20% of its value (6:6:1-5).

Then you must also give a “guilt offering” of a ram.

With respect to the daily holocaust or “burnt offering,” it “must be left on top of the altar” all night and the “fire on the altar must be kept burning all night” (6:9).  In the morning, the priest is to remove the ashes to the side, change garments, carry the ashes outside the camp.  The fire on the altar is to be kept burning.  “at all times. It must never go out” (6:13).

        

As for cereal offerings, they should be offered in front of the altar, then a handful of it burned as a token offering.  The rest may be eaten as unleavened cakes by the priest in a sacred place—it as well as the sin offering and guilt offering may be viewed as Aaron’s rightful share in the oblations offered to God.

The Ordination Offering made on the day “Aaron and his sons are anointed” [two quarts of flour] must be offered half in the morning and half in the evening. It must be mixes with olive oil and cooked on a griddle” (6:21), then sliced and “burned up completely” (6:22).

Greater detail is given regarding the sin offering is given.

Early Christian Writers

Justin Martyr (100-165 AD) – First Apology

Utterances of the Son

38 – Jesus said these prophetic things to His people when He was among them: “I have spread out My hands to a disobedient and gainsaying people, to those who walk in a way that is not good” (Is.65:2); “I gave My back to the scourges, and My cheeks to the buffetings; I turned not away My face from the shame of spittings; and the Lord was My helper: therefore was I not confounded, but I set My face as a firm rock; and I knew that I should not be ashamed, for He is near that justifieth Me” (Is.50:6). It is true that His people showed Him little respect.

Direct Predictions by the Spirit

39 – The prophesy of Isaiah 2:3, “For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more,” this prophesy has come true. This is the what the gospel is doing.

“For from Jerusalem there went out into the world, men, twelve in number, and these illiterate, of no ability in speaking: but by the power of God they proclaimed to every race of men that they were sent by Christ to teach to all the word of God; and we who formerly used to murder one another do not only now refrain from making was upon our enemies, but that saying, ‘The tongue has sworn but the mind is unsworn,’ [From Euripides’ play Hippolytus] might be imitated by oath, prefer their allegiance to their own life, and parents, and country, and all kindred, though you can offer them nothing incorruptible, it were verily ridiculous if we, who earnestly long for incorruption, should not endure all things, in order to obtain what we desire from Him who is able to grant it.”

I’m not sure I get this. I wish there was an updated translation of this.

Christ’s Advent Foretold

40 – “[W]e have thought it right and relevant to mention some other prophetic utterances of David” where his “voice has gone out into all the earth” (Ps.19:2). He “foretold the conspiracy which was formed against Christ by Herod the king of the Jews, and the Jews themselves, and Pilate, who was your governor among them, with his soldiers; and how He should be believed on by men of every race; and how God calls Him His Son, and has declared that He will subdue all His enemies under Him; and how the devils, as much as they can, strive to escape the power of God the Father and Lord of all, and the power of Christ Himself; and how God calls all to repentance before the day of judgment comes.”