Isaiah 65 is the
alternate reading for Easter or the pitch hitter for Acts 10. No offense to
Luke but given the choice I think even Jesus would choose Isaiah. Granted he
never read Acts but he did choose Isaiah 61 as the text for his first sermon in
Nazareth even if it did end badly (they tried to throw him off a cliff). His
faithfulness brings forth the justice of Isaiah 42. He is light for the
Gentiles as he gathers Israel in Isaiah 49. In Isaiah 50 he has been given the
tongue of the teacher to sustain the weary. He is the servant described in
Isaiah 53; a man familiar with suffering and acquainted with grief by whose
stripes we are healed. And so given the choice I’m going with Isaiah 65. That’s
not only a liturgical decision but a choice of what future informs our present.
Is that future a rerun of the old or is it something so new the old cannot even
be recalled? I know when I think of the alternate vision where few
are taken and the vast majority left behind, where a personal relationship with
Jesus is a password to paradise and everyone else can go to hell, it feels a lot
like the world I live in today. I want God’s future to be more than that and
when I read Isaiah I get a sense that we’ll all be surprised. But how can we
say that given all the Biblical evidence to the contrary? We can’t, but we can
hope. That’s all. A hope that even though it seemed to end badly for Jesus on a
Friday we call Good God made a choice to do something different and it really
was a brand new thing.
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