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

Proper 7 [12]/Year C 245
God will remain steadfast to God’s self-identification and in spite of the
judgment that follows is committed to the salvation of the people (vv. 8–9).
The passage opens and closes on the note of grace.
The first two verses respond to the question posed three times in the
preceding lament: “Where is the one who brought them up out of the
sea?” “Where is the one who put within them his holy spirit?” “Where
are your zeal and your might?” (63:11bc, 15b). God replies: I am always
with you. It is your alienation from me that is the issue, not mine from
you. The people need to turn (shuv) to God in repentance, always a possibility
in the theology of Israel. Third Isaiah summons them to encounter
honestly their own sinfulness and take up again the covenantal responsibility
involved in the worship of God, deeds of loving-kindness toward the
vulnerable.
Our text lists the sins that brought the prophetic indictment: the people
were “following their own devices” (v. 2), not living according to God’s
covenant of considerate justice but according to their own ideas of how
life should be lived. They were “sacrificing in gardens . . . offering incense
on bricks” and sitting “inside tombs” (vv. 3–4). They passed the night “in
secret places” and ate “swine’s flesh” (v. 4). They “offered incense on the
mountains, and reviled me on the hills” (v. 7). These are the religious
behaviors of the local fertility cult and of attempting divination by communicating
with the dead. Eating swine’s flesh violated the ban on pork
and was important to Third Isaiah because it went against Mosaic instruction
and because it symbolized the abandonment of faith in YHWH of
which the other sins were evidence.
What is worse, to these sins they add another: “do not come near me,
for I am too holy for you” (v. 5). This is like the student who plagiarizes a
paper and, upon being found out, reacts with high moral dudgeon and
a refusal to accept that he or she can be called to account. This is selfcenteredness
run amok. God finds such people nauseating: “These are a
smoke in my nostrils” (v. 5).
God reacts to this array of sinful behavior: “See, it is written before me:
I will not keep silent, but I will repay; I will indeed repay into their laps their
iniquities and their ancestors’ iniquities together, says the LORD”
(vv. 6–7). “It is written before me” alludes to the metaphor of the book in
which the deeds of sinners and of faithful people are noted. It means that
what we do matters ultimately because and only because it matters to the
One who is ultimate. Otherwise, we would be condemned to live life with
no idea that it might be ultimately important. It is a point that Jesus makes
in the parable of the Last Judgment: “just as you did it to one of the least of