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THE WORD IN SMALL BOATS

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people! ISAIAH 40:1

I quote from the Authorised Version, somewhat swallowing my pride. I am (I fear it is well known) unsound about the Authorised Version, thinking it not only primitive in scholarship but often unfelicitous in its command of the English language. Still, you won't do better for Isaiah 40:1.

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people! saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.

Not only does it actually echo the commanding rhythm of the Hebrew original: nahamu nahamu ammî. It conveys what a modern translation is powerless to convey since modern English lacks a grammatical form for the plural imperative. And that happens to be the most important thing this prophet has to tell us about prophecy: that the echoing divine command, commissioning a message of reassurance and comfort to Jerusalem, is in the plural, addressed not to a single prophet but to an indeterminate number.

Prophecy has been the theme of Christian reflection on the Second Sunday in Advent ever since the formation of a common eucharistic lectionary in the medieval Western church. Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. So Saint Paul, in the passage read as the Epistle (Rom. 15:4), associated the forward-looking hope of Christian expectation with the retrospective reading of the Scriptures of the Jewish people. They had a meaning, too, for our times, upon whom the ends of the ages have come. In the new Church of England lectionary which came into effect last week we are invited to experience Advent at Matins in the company of Isaiah and that school of anonymous prophets whose work is bound up with his, the authors of most of the passages traditionally beloved at Carol Services. And today, when prophecy itself is our theme, our guide is the greatest of these anonymous successors, the figure christened by heavy-handed scholars "Deutero-Isaiah". We can't go on calling him that — it sounds so pompous and unfriendly! So let us take a leaf out of the book of another anonymous prophet, one known by the lead-word of his most famous prophecy, Behold, I send my messenger (Malachi) before me. We can call Deutero-Isaiah by the lead-word of his most famous prophecy, too. Let him be known as "Comfort-ye"! It has a pleasingly Puritan sound.

Comfort-ye, we must understand, lived in the mid-sixth century bc, after the cataclysm. When his parents were young and his grandparents at the height of their powers, the Babylonian armies burned Jerusalem to the ground and destroyed the kingdom of Judah as a political society, carrying away its ruling, priestly, and educated élites to the humiliation of exile by the Euphrates, hundreds of miles from their homes. As Comfort-ye grew up (no one is quite sure where, in Babylonia or among the ruins of Judaea) he was taught that this was no chance twist in the ever-unstable politics of the region, but the purpose of Israel's wrathful God, who had struggled for generations for the obedience of his people and had consistently given them detailed circumstantial warnings through his servants the prophets. And about the prophets he learned this, too: that at the last, when disaster fell about their heads and all their terrible predictions came to pass, they had had one final message: the calamity, though total, was not ultimate. After seventy years, said Jeremiah, God would visit his people. And now, for the first time since those traumatic happenings, geopolitical turmoil visited the Near East again. Babylon faced its last weeks of power before the assaults of its vassal, Cyrus of Persia. To Comfort-ye it seemed that fulfilment was near. The message must go out: Your God is coming.

But could there still be a prophet now? The great prophets had been persons of public weight. They had stood confrontationally before kings as accredited interpreters of world-events; in the city-gate they challenged and aroused popular sentiment about laws and customs and politics. They performed their message with drama and with music, assisted by a troupe of followers and watched by crowds who flocked around them as crowds flock around entertainers. There were no kings now, no gate, no crowds. Where was the troupe of followers to be found? Where was the social support to provide a prophet and his followers a livelihood? To think of being a prophet in those days must have been like someone in our time thinking of being a powerful nobleman like the First Duke of Marlborough. The role does not exist. There is no social space for such a thing. The making of Judah's history by the spokesmen of the Most High was in the past. What remained now was only to record and reflect on the history that had been made. In Comfort-ye's day historical interpretation had passed, once and for all it seemed, out of the hands of actors into the hands of historians. His was an age of books. From it there comes the great narrative of Israel's past, the Books of the Kingdoms. But how could a people be aroused to the new moment simply by reading historians?

And then there was the question of the call. Each of the great prophets had pointed to a moment of vocation and authorisation, a vision in which God revealed the meaning of the times and sent him out upon his difficult way. Isaiah beheld the throne of God in the temple in the year that King Uzziah died. Jeremiah saw an almond tree two years before King Josiah launched his great reform. Ezekiel even laid claim to such a vision in Babylonia, though that was before Jerusalem fell. Those great vocational dramas brought the personality of the prophet before the public. They imprinted his identity upon their minds. But Comfort-ye comes before us anonymously. And that is not the result of some accident of transmission, tearing off a title, perhaps, from a scroll, so that the work got copied out incongruously at the back end of Isaiah. It is the prophet's self-conscious and deliberate mode of presenting himself. Prophecy in his time must be quite different, independent of personality and social role. Independent also, perhaps, though this is less clear, of dramatic presentation, more like pure poetry. Yet it must still declare the great event as it unfolds, and to prove itself it must show its continuity with the great prophetic legacy. One of Isaiah's most dramatic gestures was to seal up a scroll with a prophecy written on it and hand it to his disciples with the instruction to hide it away until the time was right. Comfort-ye's dramatic gesture is to open a scroll containing one of the newly compiled collections of Isaiah's words, and then solemnly to add his own compositions to it.

There is, then, no call-narrative. Generations of readers have felt the want of one, even back in pre-Christian times when the Old Testament was first translated into Greek. Comfort-ye wrote, apparently, A voice says, 'Cry!' Another says, 'What shall I cry?' And the translator, followed by most translators afterwards, wrote: "And I said, 'What shall I cry?'" Probably wrongly; but even if the translator was right, that is not much of a prophetic commission. This great overture with which the prophet begins his work is almost stubborn in its refusal to conform to what we expect of an opening gesture. In a Kierkegaardian mood we might call it "a non-visionary prologue in place of a call-narrative and without authority". Nothing is seen. Nothing is said to the prophet personally. There is just this sequence of voices, one after another, voices that he overhears, passing a message on like a chain of runners. Comfort ye, comfort ye ...! says the first. And the next, Prepare ye the way of the Lord in the desert! Cry! says the third. What shall I cry? asks the fourth. All flesh is as grass, says the fifth. And then at the very end of the sequence a messenger is named. And here is a most puzzling moment, which actually contains the solution to the puzzle of the sequence of voices. "Zion", the city of Jerusalem, is to stand on her hilltop and proclaim, so that all her dependent towns and villages may hear. But didn't the first voice say, Speak comfortably to Jerusalem? The addressee must become the messenger! The comforted must become the comforter! And her message is, Your God is coming!

See, then, what has happened to prophecy. Now, the whole people has become a prophetic people. Jerusalem has become a prophetic city. But to whom, then, is the prophecy addressed? If all are prophets, who will be hearers? Comfort-ye never tires of telling us. The coastlands, the nations, the ends of the earth: they are to hear the message! God's great restorative act is not for this people only but through them touches the world. And that is why the proclamations of Israel's prophets are proclamations to us, too. That is why we read them in Advent as our preparation for celebrating the Nativity. It is not that there lies encoded in Ancient Near-Eastern documents a secret message only to be understood six centuries later. It is that the nation whose experiences they interpret is itself God's prophetic message to us. Its role in history was to embody the message of the judging and restoring grace of God to all mankind, and so to prepare the way for the coming of God in judgment and grace. Jerusalem is comforted; Jerusalem comforts; therefore we, too, take comfort. Jerusalem is told to look for her God, and cries out that he is coming; therefore we, too, may look for her God coming to us.

Your God is coming! This message now takes precedence over all other possible prophetic messages. When Jeremiah was commissioned, he was set over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. He would hold the tumultuous rise and fall of nations in his hand. Not so Comfort-ye. His message is almost detached in its view of such things. All flesh is as grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it. Their growth, their grandeur, their falling away is as predictable as grass in spring which scorches under the sirocco. Comfort-ye has a view of the cyclical, law-bound character of great events. He does not look to them to disclose anything new. All but for one thing: the word of the Lord endures for ever. That is the word of promise, the word of God's coming to his people. That is what now gives shape and meaning to the unfolding of history. Everything is focussed upon that. Behold the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd. Here is the goal of all world history, the yearning of Israel and of the nations.

At one level Comfort-ye was a true prophet in the great tradition of Israel's true prophets. Like them he read the history of his times and got it right. For we should never forget that the high standing of prophecy in Israel grew from an almost astonishing record of getting things right. That is one of those stubborn facts about ancient Israel which our scepticism or belief has simply to take the measure of. They didn't all get it right, of course; the record does not conceal interpretative conflicts among prophets, between "false" and "true". And it didn't come out as they said all at once; Jeremiah lamented bitterly that he had been announcing the fall of Jerusalem for nearly forty years before it happened. But happen it did, and in the manner that he said it would. And what Comfort-ye said would happen, did happen. Cyrus the conqueror sent exiled peoples back to their homes, and Judah took up its national life again.

Looked at from another angle, though, Comfort-ye may seem the most doubtfully successful of all the prophets. Yes, there was the Decree of Cyrus and the community of returning exiles resettling in Jerusalem and Judah. Butt nothing could make it seem like the triumphant and world-renewing event that he described. The actual story of the returned community is something of an anti-climax after what he taught us to anticipate: an uphill struggle, often frustrated by hostile neighbours and by fruitless tensions between rigorists and compromisers in the community. In the next century Ezra still complains of political dependence upon Persia, Behold we are slaves this day; in the land that thou gavest to our fathers.... behold we are slaves (Neh. 10:36). And, of course, the restored community never held more than a proportion of the Jews in the Near East. There were those — and their voices are clearly heard within the Psalter — who never returned, never lived in the Holy Land thereafter.

Yet we would not have grasped the point if we thought that this ambiguous outcome seriously compromised Comfort-ye's announcement. He was looking for a return, but not for a restoration. His interest in this last step in Israel's sacred history was not that it should pave the way back to a glorious status quo, back to the days when David could boast that he ruled from the Mediterranean to the Upper Euphrates. It was simply that God's act of faithfulness to his people should be an ensign to the nations, a light to the Gentiles. Israel's history needed this last act as a message, a sign of the coming of God to the whole world. The great model-history itself, from Exodus to Second Exodus, was essentially completed at that point. The future lay with the sending of that message out. This was a prophetic history, and Israel's role was to proclaim it and make it comprehensible. No longer actors in events as they transpired, the prophets of the future would be poets and preachers, celebrating events already achieved. And that was why prophets of the future often imitated this prophet's self-imposed anonymity.

When as Christians, and probably as Gentile Christians, we read him as a prophet of the Incarnation, we prove the truth of his conviction that the coming of God to Israel was to be a light to the nations. Yet we must take our own responsibility for affirming that this coming touched Gentile history in the birth of a Jewish baby in Bethlehem. It was not his vocation to know of that or send us coded messages about it. We stand in no need of such messages. But we do stand in need of prophecy, of the account of God's working in history that tells how and where to look for its fulfilment. He tells us we shall find it by listening to the Jew, who speaks to us out of the deepest suffering yet triumphantly of the faithfulness of God, comforting his people, bringing their long struggle to an end, forgiving all their sin.

Chapter Two

That the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the same body. EPHESIANS 3:6

The wise men seem so inevitable that we fail to see that they are really intruders. Imaginatively, we identify with them. "We three kings of Orient are", the Epiphany Collect, T. S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi all treat them as a symbol of our own spiritual pilgrimage to "the fruition of the godhead". But imagine yourself for a moment at the receiving end of their enquiries, as they barge into a Jewish pastoral idyll which is none of their business and which they do not understand. They put the wrong question at the wrong moment to the wrong person, hopelessly confused by Hellenistic political theology and astrology, and the result is tragedy. The story ought to be an object-lesson in the importance of not meddling.

We depend on people knowing what is and is not their business. Society grows for itself a kind of network of membranes which separate one set of concerns from another, create sheltered areas of shared responsibility, and facilitate diversity and complexity. These membranes are essential if anything valuable is to develop, like walls in a garden that protect and support the plants that could never grow on an open moor. They protect us from social exposure, which is to say, shame. A society that was entirely open — everything equally accessible to view from everywhere — would be bleak, barren, and intolerably aggressive. A subtle code of manners protects distinctions, not necessarily of value or worth, but simply of difference, marking off what can be said here, among friends, from what can be said there, among strangers. There is nothing prejudicial about that, though, of course, it can become degenerate and corrupt. Without a sense of "at home" and "abroad", we can never go anywhere. A refusal to acknowledge the difference between fellow-countrymen and foreigners would not mean better treatment for foreigners. Better see a foreigner as a foreigner! Better find him interesting and instructive! Otherwise you will see him as a failed specimen of the human race who has never learned how to behave!

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE WORD IN SMALL BOATS by Oliver O'Donovan Copyright © 2010 by Oliver O'Donovan. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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