000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

150 Trinity Sunday/Year B
Trinity Sunday/Year B
Isaiah 6:1–8, (9–13)
Today’s reading is referred to as Isaiah’s call or commission or his Temple
vision. The text of Isaiah has been redacted so extensively that it is pointless
to treat it as straightforward autobiography. In its canonical context,
we have to see today’s passage as Isaiah’s commissioning for a particular
political mission in relation to an invasion from Syria/Samaria in or about
734 BCE. Chapters 6–8 have to do with precisely such an invasion.
Although the text begins “in the year that King Uzziah died” (v. 1), we do
not know the exact date of Uzziah’s death.
Because the Lord instructed Isaiah to say to the people “do not comprehend
. . . do not understand . . . stop their ears . . . shut their eyes . . .
that they may not . . . listen . . . and comprehend . . . and turn and be
healed” (vv. 9b–10), the text does two things: it validates Isaiah’s mission
and explains why it did not work, why the people did not respond understandingly
to Isaiah’s prophecy. Alternatively, if we see the mission as the
text intends, we see that it did succeed: its purpose was to ensure that the
people would not understand and turn and be healed.
The theological conundrum raised by the text is this: why would God
foreordain that the hearts of the people be hardened against the message
of God’s prophet? The historical answer might be that Isaiah’s mission did
fail and that this passage is an after-the-fact explanation of the reason for
the failure—God determined ahead of time that it would fail. This statement
still leaves open the question, why would God do that?
In the anti-Jewish tradition that runs so strongly through the history of
the church, this text has frequently been abused by putting it into the service
of a displacement theology which argues that the Jews are a stubborn,
obdurate people who never listened to God and that, as a consequence,
the covenant has passed to us and we replace Jews in God’s affections. This
is a works-righteous argument that makes God’s unconditional grace
dependent on the condition that its recipients respond appropriately. Its
self-contradictory nature is transparent.
Our text opens in the Temple (v. 1) with the Lord sitting on an elevated
throne surrounded by six seraphs. The “LORD of hosts” (v. 3) is YHWH
of whom Isaiah speaks more than sixty times as “YHWH of the [heavenly]
hosts” (v. 3). Seraphs means “burning ones,” which would explain the “live
coal” in verse 6. Probably this text is selected for Trinity Sunday because
of the threefold hymn of praise “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts”