Coincidently, one of the texts assigned for this morning's reading is from the great 40th chapter of the book of Isaiah, so I thought, why not look at what this 130 year old commentary has to say about this passage. And it turns out that this scholar from 130 years ago had an insight into this text that has haunted me all this past week.
He looks at the 21st verse of Isaiah 40 (the first verse of our reading this morning) and pays close attention to the verbs in the sentence. And he tells the reader that in the original Hebrew, the first two questions are in the future tense [really "imperfect" in the sense incomplete action] and the second two questions are in the past tense ["perfect" in the sense of completed action].
You don't get that insight from reading the English questions because the verb "known" and "heard" are, of course, past tense. The first two questions should really read, "Have you not [yet] known? Have you not [yet] understood?"
The two verbs in the questions, by the way, are probably the two best known verbs in the Hebrew language. The first verb, "to know" appears early in the Bible, most famously in Genesis 4:1 where we read, "And Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain [her son]." From this we get the quaint euphemism, "He knew her in the biblical sense." Knowledge in the Hebrew language usually suggests an intimate relationship between the knower and the one who is known.
The second verb, "to hear" is found most significantly in the passage that every Jewish youngster must memorize at their bar mitzvah or bas mitzvah. "Shema Y'srael. Adonai elohenu Adonai echad." Hear O Israel. The lord your God is One." [Deuteronomy 6:4] and the verse goes on in Deuteronomy 6:5 to a verse we Christians know very well indeed, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." Which Jesus coupled with a verse from Leviticus, "And you shall love your neighbor as yourself" to complete all that we need to know and all that we need to hear from the Law.
And you shall know these things intimately in the very marrow of your bones. You shall know these things as intimately as Adam knew Eve. And we shall trust in these mysteries so that they sink into our hearts long before they encounter our heads. For knowing, in the first instance is not about understanding with our heads, but with all our hearts and all our souls and all our strength. The great reformer, Martin Luther, commenting on this passage said, "Many have notions of God, but few have knowledge of God" in the sense in which Isaiah uses the word.
There is a certain tone of exasperation in the voice of God as recorded in Isaiah. "Have you not, after all these years, after all these generations, after all I have done, have you not yet heard that the Lord your God who is unique and who created all things and will continue to abide with you through all things, have you not yet heard and do you not yet understand, that I will help you now and always?"
The painfully human inability to wait, the lack of patience, the penchant for self-pity is rooted in commitments to things that are proximate rather than ultimate; that are close at hand rather than a distance off. That are time-burdened rather than timeless. That are captive to the "now" and have no sense of the "then" toward which we are all heading.
Philip Yancey quotes Jack Miles who sums up the messages of the three great prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel as respectively, "the manic, the depressive and the psychotic articulation of the prophetic message. As for calm, sane, moderate visions of prophecy, in effect, there are none." (p. 172, The Bible Jesus Read).
In Isaiah's manic message here is a God who is perversely in love with creation and even more in love with God's special and chosen people who are just now find themselves in exile. When faced with enemies, they trusted, as it is written, "in their chariots and in the multitude of their warriors." And their chariots and their warriors were not enough against the mighty Babylonians and they were defeated and brought into exile in what is now modern Iraq. They're rightly angry as they can be because they no longer understand their place in God's world. And God is at once angry with their lack of vision, and possessed of a great compassion for their plight.
The message then is something like, "Have you not yet gotten the point? I will be with you always as I have always been with you. Even and perhaps especially now that you feel so abandoned. If you wait on me now, I will give you wings just like eagles and you will run even this long race and never grow weary. Just don't let proximate goals cause you to stop. Don't stop until you fall into my arms. And then I will carry you home."
These verses in Isaiah 40 ... are designed to get us to see our problems no matter how large against the background of our incomparable God. The problem is that we turn this around. We stand between God and our problems, with our back to God, and [our] focus on [our] problems. But by doing so we completely lose sight of God's [ongoing intimacy with us; of God's continuing power in our lives]. [J. Hampton Keathley III, Th.M.]
We fail to see the forest of God's love for the trees of all our difficulties.
Let me tell you a story. The names and circumstances of this story have been changed to avoid undo embarrassment, but the story is true nonetheless.
There once was a young man who throughout his adolescence was a difficult person. Difficult for his family, difficult for his friends and difficult, very likely, for himself. I doubt whether this child would look back on his adolescence and say that it was the best time of his life. And neither would his family. He was, it seemed always in trouble. In fact, if his father had not been a police officer, he might even have a record. He set off firecrackers in public places almost starting a fire and almost giving an elderly woman a heart attack. He had a speeding record. His work at school was dismal and he spent more time in the principal's office than the principal did.
His family was a church-going family but still, his mother and father and his other brothers were at their wit's end. They had to have asked in their moments of heartfelt prayer, "Where are you God? And what exactly do you have in mind here?" There was, to say the very least, no clear answer to that prayer in those moments. So, they just lived through it, loving their wayward son as best as they were able, losing their temper more than once, and trying to pad his meanderings so that he didn't do permanent damage to himself or others around him.
The end of this story, of course, is that through amazing twists and turns, set-backs and delays, this young man completed college and is now working with the Peace Corps in a desperately poor village in Eastern Africa, teaching English to a group of children and adolescents there.
And now his parents and grandparents look back on that chaotic journey and say, "Oh, that's what God was doing."
Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The patterns of God's work are almost never apparent in our lives while we are living them. The patterns of God's presence are almost always discernable only as we look back on our lives. That's why older folks are great sources for wisdom. Because they have lived long enough, they have had their hearts broken often enough, they have seen great love often enough, to see the patterns and encourage us to live with patience and hope.
Hope is the ability to live forward that which can only be understood as we look back. It is the key to living to know in the most intimate sense that the God who made heaven and earth and gave a name to every living thing, will, if we wait patiently, give us also wings like eagles and cause us to run the race and never grow weary.