NOTES for Isa 25:1-27:13

Isaiah's prophecy speaks of Christ's Resurrection: "And He will remove the reproach from His people." Reproach is not only insults, suffering, and oppression. It is also the burden of sin, which, like disease, like leprosy, separates a person from God and from other people. It is also original sin, by which we are marked and from which we cannot be freed except through death and Resurrection on the day of Judgment. And His people are everyone who lays down his soul for Him and for the Gospel.

Death has already been swallowed up forever. And the joy of the Resurrection is with us every day. And on the last day there will be a rainbow, and the Lord will restore paradise on earth, and His people will go up the mountain and celebrate their meeting with the Lord and the restoration of the world. The world as it was conceived and created in the first days.

The middle of Great Lent is approaching, and today we therefore read the prophet Isaiah's words about God's victory. The prophet sings a hymn to the Almighty and speaks of a victory spreading ever more widely. At the beginning of the passage he praises God for the destruction of a kingdom opposed to Him; then the prophet's gaze turns to the salvation of the poor and oppressed. He says that, thanks to the Almighty's intervention, the breath of tyrants was like a storm against a wall, and He subdued the raging of the enemies. But then the prophet says that, just like earthly oppressors, oppressors of an entirely different kind will also be defeated and subdued. The Lord will destroy the covering that lies over all peoples, that is, the barrier between all people and Himself. Finally, the prophet praises the victory over death and suffering themselves: death will be swallowed up forever, and the Lord God will wipe away the tears from every face. Faith that this is how it will be can be a source of strength for us at all times.

The song of the prophet Isaiah read today contains a very important Revelation by God about Himself, one sharply at odds with the stereotypes of religious psychology. The Lord speaks about the disasters that befell the people who were unfaithful to Him and about His involvement in their destiny. People generally tend to regard every disaster, or even life's minor troubles, as punishment for offenses against the Almighty. In doing so, we picture God as a petty and malicious football referee who carefully counts the “goals scored and conceded.”

But the Lord Himself says that He is the keeper of His vineyard, protecting it day and night. “I have no wrath,” He proclaims through the prophet. Therefore, His actions in our lives and in history are not caused by anger or a desire to punish us. No, says the Lord, He acts to preserve the purity and holiness of His vineyard. “Were there briers and thorns confronting Me, ... I would burn them all.” And the prophet concludes that this purifying flame will lead to vindication: “this will be the fruit of the removal of his sin.”

Describing the people of God, to whom God opens the gates of the renewed Jerusalem, the prophet speaks of them as people who are "righteous" and "keep faithfulness" (in the Synodal translation they are called those who "keep truth"), people with "firm will" or "firm intention" (or the "firm spirit" of the Synodal translation). What stands behind these prophetic definitions? None of the biblical authors ever considered righteousness to be inherent in a human being. God alone is righteous. For a person, righteousness is not a property or a quality, but a state. A person can be righteous as long as God's righteousness is reflected in him. This is possible if a person keeps unconditional faithfulness to God, which is why the prophet calls the righteous those who "keep faithfulness."

What helps a person keep faithfulness to God? Isaiah answers this question as well: firmness of intention. Or firmness of will, which in this case is the same thing. This is not willpower in the sense in which we are used to understanding the expression. By willpower we usually mean a specific effort needed in a specific situation. But the prophet speaks of a strength of will that belongs to a person as an inalienable property of his spiritual "I." The difference here is the same as between, for example, muscular effort applied in a specific situation and muscle tone, which belongs in principle to a physically healthy person regardless of the effort being made. Just as normal physical life is impossible without physical tone, so normal spiritual life is impossible without volitional tone. Spiritual life is, first of all, relationships that bind a person to God and to other people, and these are impossible without volitional tone. Without volitional tone, these relationships cannot be stable and constant. In that case, preserving faithfulness (whether to God or to a person) will have to be forgotten: a person without will simply has nothing with which to preserve it. Faithfulness, after all, presupposes more than emotions or theorizing, which usually require no special effort of will.

Faithfulness to God, for example, requires keeping the commandments given by God, if only because at Sinai, during the making of the covenant-union with God, their observance was prescribed as an indispensable condition of the union being made. No keeping of the commandments - no covenant; no covenant - no relationship with God. Faithfulness to Him in that case turns out to be purely theoretical. But life with God, life in the Kingdom, is not theory but practice. And it is impossible without a firm intention to keep faithfulness to God and to guard the relationships that unite with Him the faithful who seek the Kingdom.

Advent is a season with a particularly good selection of readings. They are short and extremely concrete. It is a time to return to the way children learn what matters most. Isaiah and Matthew give us two opportunities to understand something that is unpleasant to understand. They explain it in simple words. They explain it as to children, using different arguments and trying to lead us to act reasonably. It is no accident that the Sermon on the Mount, with all the force of its directness, ends with three verses about a house on rock and a house on sand. Like little children, the Lord teaches us His truth, which is that we can do anything—even build a house on sand. A house on sand is a house built upon what is temporary. The rock is what is eternal. In our life, only the Lord is eternal.

The Lord gives His salvation in place of walls and ramparts. Walls and ramparts are a defense, an ordinary physical defense that will keep enemies from entering our lives. But walls and ramparts are a defense made by human hands. Whether we create this defense ourselves or receive it from those around us, it remains human. It is probably good and important to have such protection in life, when a person knows that there is someone or something to lean on. But the Lord's protection is still more important. And His protection is salvation. Salvation is not merely a situation in which enemies do not come and cause harm. Salvation is a situation in which the Lord Himself comes. Then it is no longer so frightening even if enemies appear within sight, dangerously close. Walls are unnecessary because He is not merely the best protection; He is the only true protection.

Describing the messianic era, the prophet especially mentions the full and final victory over death. In general, the Bible says much about victory over death and about the universal resurrection at the end of time. As for what happens after death, the biblical books say almost nothing about it. Unlike Egyptian or Greek texts, the Bible says nothing about the immortality of the soul and recompense beyond the grave. This is not surprising: an immortal soul existing separately from the body is not yet life in all its fullness.

Life in all its fullness can only be the life of the whole human being, soul and body together, not apart. But that is not the only point. The point is also how the Bible sees the human being. We, people of the modern age, look at the human being more through the eyes of a Greek philosopher than through the eyes of the authors of the biblical books. For us, a human being is an eternal and unchanging soul joined to a temporary and fragile body. But in the Bible the soul is by no means unchanging.

In the biblical books, the soul is not a structure at all, but a process. It is the flow of human life in all its manifestations, from the highest spiritual aspirations to simple physiology, such as breathing and blood circulation. And into this essentially natural flow enters that "breath of life" which God "breathes" into the human being's "nostrils" at creation.

At the point where these two flows intersect, God's "breath of life" and natural existence, as a modern philosopher would call the biblical "soul," the human person is born. The fullness of human life is determined by the intensity of this natural process. And the intensity of the process depends on what determines its quality: nature or God's "breath of life." Here there are many possibilities, from the fullness of life in the Kingdom to its minimum in Sheol, in the world of shadows, where one can speak of life only in a very qualified sense.

In the Bible, death is not the disappearance of the human being, not his departure into nonbeing, but the draining away of life within him to the minimum that turns the dead person into an empty shell, a lifeless shadow. The opposite of death is not simply life, but life in fullness, in that fullness which is possible only in the Kingdom. In the Kingdom there is no place for death in any of its forms and there can be none. Therefore the coming of the Messiah and the arrival of the messianic Kingdom put an end to death: as long as death has not disappeared completely, life has not yet won. That means the Kingdom in all its fullness has not yet come either.

How little what Isaiah writes resembles what happens in Matthew... The healing of the sick and the multiplication of loaves in the wilderness seem so unlike the prophet's vision. Whichever verse we take, everything is different! And yet what happens in the wilderness, when the blind see, lepers are cleansed, and the Savior feeds all who are in need, is precisely the fulfillment of the prophecies in life. When words labor to express the inexpressible, a person tries somehow to fit them into his own understanding. Later, he finds it difficult to admit that they come to life differently from what he imagined. But this does not prevent God from fulfilling His promises and wiping away the tears from every face.

The Lord calls all those who are struggling and hurting to come to Him. These words are about all of us, as Alexander Blok would later write, "about all who are weary in a foreign land, about all the ships that have gone to sea, about all who have forgotten their joy." We are called to Himself by a caring God, the Father, in whose image and likeness we were created and who is hurt when we hurt. We are called to Himself by God, who knows what suffering and pain are, by Christ, who passed through more suffering than each of us and showed that even beyond death there is a breakthrough into Resurrection. The Holy Spirit awaits meeting us, God who gives rest and strength to hope and believe that the breakthrough will certainly come...

The Lord perhaps has no stronger desire than for His children to come to Him so that He can pour out all His love on them. He wants to remove our burdens from us, everything that prevents our gaze from being constantly turned toward Him, and in exchange to give us something far more precious. Something that has many names, but the main one, probably, is Love. This is the good yoke and the light burden of which He speaks. And at the same time, as Christ Himself showed us, His burden is the Cross... The Cross and the breakthrough into Resurrection: this is the real life that God offers us.

The reading of today from the book of the prophet Isaiah is another hymn of love. "The desire of our soul is to thy name, and to the remembrance of thee.", - Says Isaiah. Can we remember God ceaselessly? Probably, the prophet aspires to something of this kind: so that thought from any subject passes harmoniously and naturally into thoughts about Him – just as all the thoughts of a person in love smoothly and naturally return to thoughts of the beloved.

Yes or no? The word announced by Isaiah almost 27 centuries ago will come true or not? One can say that it is the key question defining our relation towards life. One can live only by leaning on this prediction, only by hoping that it is truth. Otherwise everything loses its meaning, and life becomes horrible and absurd. Indeed, suffering swamps the world as a deluge, and deliverance from it is not seen. All our joy and high aspirations, all our good deeds, quite as all our sins, wickedness and greediness are vanities and chasing of wind, because death waits for everyone. But, when God says these words through the prophet – everything changes. The sovereignty of death is not definitive, it will be overcome, and all the suffering of people will find consolation – implying to have the meaning to live.

God gives a multitude of confirmations of His loyalty throughout the history, so that we can believe preeminently in this promise. In the life of everyone who seeks for God, accumulates the experience showing that God is faithful - in particular so that you can believe. For our relation towards our self, towards life and towards the world it is the fundament, which psychology calls "basic trust". Without it, no person can grow intellectually and in emotionally healthy.

And all the same the prophet summons us to the exploit of trust. Believing to his words is also difficult, as it was difficult for Peter to believe the Lord Jesus, come down out of the boat and walk on the water. Indeed, we can receive a definitive assertion of the truthfulness of the words of the prophet only when his word will come true. But how difficult it is not to believe in these words! All our essence opposes to this sinister nonsense, in which is transformed our life of distrust. Somewhere in the inconceivable intimacy of the human nature is put the secret knowledge of the fact that this prediction is true. And that is why hope is so vivifying for us.

People who don’t read the Bible and don’t believe in God often say "it is God’s punishment", in relation to themselves or to other people, being in a difficult situation. But is it possible to lay a claim to God for having jumped from the ninth floor, you break to death? Scarcely can we find the inevitable action of the law of universal gravitation as a punishment. Unless we require from God explanations, on what account He established such laws. Even from a human point of view, such claims are ridiculous and absurd: the Creator has the right to decide Alone, without consultation with the creation, of which laws define the functioning of the world. And the disdain of the fundamental laws of the universe brings inevitably to terrible consequences. The ignorance of the law or the refusal to recognize that the law exists doesn’t mean that it stops acting, and stops to present to us each time its terrible account. And that is the demonstration of judgment. The ignorance of the law doesn’t free us from responsibility. Because the possibility of knowing it is given to us. They are all written in the Bible. But will that teach us something? Are the fruits of evil in the world little for me? Is work not enough for me here? We can close eyes on what does not concern us directly, but because of that His judgments will not in any case stop coming true in the earth and, if we don’t believe by words, then we shall learn the truth by terrible human methods.

"That day"... For the prophet Isaiah this day is in the future. Where is this day for us? In the past, when the Son of God agreed to die on the cross for our salvation? Or in the future, when He will come in power and glory and will achieve the definitive victory on evil? And if this day was today, and in this day such a meeting is laid ahead for us, when we shall say: "lo, this is our God!"? Do we want this meeting? Is there in us this hope, without which the meeting is impossible? Are we ready to accept the joy that brings this meeting?

The theme of universal resurrection appears quite early in prophetic preaching. Isaiah of Jerusalem already speaks of it quite clearly. As for existence after death—whether blessed or wretched—the biblical books say practically nothing about it, and what little they do mention is based not on revelation received by their authors but on pre-biblical pagan experience.

There is nothing surprising about this. What, after all, is the afterlife described at length, for example, in Egyptian and Greek sacred books? Ultimately it is a condition that can be called life in the full sense only with certain qualifications. Human consciousness is indeed preserved in the state after death described by these sources; this is not the biblical Sheol, the realm of shadows where, strictly speaking, there is no life at all. Yet the human being as God conceived and created him cannot be reduced to consciousness alone, even though self-awareness truly is the foundation of spiritual life. A human being possesses both a psychic and a physical nature, and this nature is necessary precisely for a full spiritual life. The preservation of consciousness alone, even in all its fullness and clarity, is therefore insufficient for such a life.

And God revealed to His people that what awaits everyone at the end of the journey is not an afterlife but resurrection—a return to life in all its transfigured fullness, the only life that can be considered worthy of a human being as the image of God.

"There is no wrath in Me," the Lord says today. And this is very hard to understand, because "the wrath of God" is one of the most fundamental concepts of Holy Scripture. Yet it is also one of the stumbling blocks for many. We do not want to see in our Lord the traits of the pagan Zeus the Thunderer, because this pagan god, in his other qualities, is very far from the Face of God truly revealed by Christ.

In fact, the Jewish people, like any other people, could not avoid a mythological stage in their religious development; nevertheless, they came to know a special Revelation, and these two qualities, the earthly and the heavenly, were woven together in Holy Scripture. Therefore we need to trace very carefully the whole development of the concept of God's wrath, and of wrath in general, in Scripture.

That is a separate major work, but let us recall at least this passage from the Apostle's Epistles: "Be angry, and do not sin: do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity." (Eph 4:25) These words are somewhat unusual and paradoxical; "be angry and do not sin," Bishop Cassian translates, making the strangeness even stronger. If the words of the Synodal Translation can still be understood as "do not sin by means of anger," that is, do not be angry at all, Bishop Cassian's rendering no longer allows such an interpretation. So we are called to be angry, but not longer than one day: "do not let the sun go down on your anger."

This can become the key to the misunderstanding described above that can arise in us today when we read the prophet Isaiah: God's wrath is real and is described many times in Holy Scripture, yet there is no wrath in Him, for it is only a healthy reaction to the "briers and thorns" brought in from outside. Therefore the sun does not go down on God's wrath. Just as it must not go down on ours.