a second exodus
Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C: Hebrew Bible
Welcome to Liturgical Threads! This is the first material of the week, focused on the Hebrew Bible selection from the Revised Common Lectionary: Joshua 5:9-12. You can look forward to materials from the Epistle and the Gospel later this week.
Grace and peace,
Justin
Isaiah 43:16-21
The Lord said to Joshua, "Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." And so that place is called Gilgal to this day.
While the Israelites were camped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho. On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.
Just a week ago, we read words similar to these in the Epistle reading. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, declared to them, "The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived!" Paul perceived the promise of God, to remake the world, in the life and death of Jesus Christ, and he was bursting to share that new reality with his readers.
Five hundred years earlier, the prophet Isaiah anticipated Paul, seeing signs even despite exile in Babylon that God was up to something new and exciting and subversive.
There were rumors,
rumors of a return to the Promised Land.
A foreign king, Cyrus of the Persians, was hoping to take the credit for this momentous event. But, Isaiah saw the truth: only God could be the force behind such a return, behind a Second Exodus, so like the first, and yet so much more than that event in the far distant past.
"I am about to do a new thing!" God whispers to Isaiah. "Now it springs forth; can't you already see it happening?" And, as Isaiah looks at the signs of the times and listens to sounds on the winds, he begins to notice something:
that smell on the air, the one you get a whiff of before a storm;
a freshness, brought in from distant lands;
that hint of soil, renewed by the rain.
Where before wilderness existed, dangerous and bone-dry, now a garden has sprung up! "I will make a way in the wilderness!" God declares. "I will make rivers in the desert, from which all the animals will drink, and so too will my chosen people, as they return to their homes."
These five simple verses are a microcosm of the story God has been teaching us since the beginning. The world is a certain way, and we must live in that world. It has a fallenness to it, a reflection of our own limitations and shortcomings.
It is a world inevitably governed by the law of entropy, of all things slowly and inevitably slipping into disorder and chaos, despite our best efforts to engineer things otherwise.
But, in the midst of that slippage, God is doing something, something new and different and extraordinary.
In the midst of a brutal Iron Age, God selected a people made up of slaves and outcasts.
From exile and displacement, God brought a people home.
From colonialism and empire, God conquered death with love.
Through it all, through everything we've subjected ourselves to, through the false stories of power and scarcity and division and violence, God has been whispering a different story. In our wildernesses, God calls forth a garden. In our exile, God ushers us home.
"I am about to do a new thing! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?"
Just look, and see.
The Book of Isaiah is one of the hinge points of all Scripture, perhaps the most impactful of the prophetic books in the Hebrew Bible and a huge influence on the Jewish faith as a whole, and later, Jesus Christ himself (it was Isaiah from which Jesus reads in Luke 4, initiating his ministry.) The Jewish Publication Society, in their introduction to Isaiah in The Jewish Study Bible writes, "Isaiah is perhaps the best-loved of the prophetic books", and notes that it is the most cited prophetic text in later rabbinic literature.
Isaiah is also a highly difficult and complex text, made up variously of poetry, prophecy, narrative, and speeches. Scholars generally agree that it is made up of at least three separately composed sections: First Isaiah in chapters 1-39, Second Isaiah in 40-55, and Third Isaiah in 56-66 (although this is the easiest and most conservative estimate of division; it is more likely it is a composition with a complexity far beyond this simple tripartite division.)
Our reading this week is taken from Second Isaiah, which was likely written near the end of the Babylonian exile, and in anticipation of the coming return to Palestine at the behest of the Persian King Cyrus. The name "Isaiah" is of course the one given to this collection of texts, but it's impossible to say with any certainty who the author was, in the unlikely scenario is was just one person. In fact, is the three Isaiah's scenario is true, then it is impossible as that First and Second Isaiah share a common author, as they were likely composed 150-200 years apart. While Second Isaiah writes in a context of exile, and imminent return, First Isaiah was composed pre-exile, in the Jerusalem of the 8th century BCE.
Second Isaiah was writing a text of consolation for the people of Judah who were still stuck in Exile. He hoped to kindle the hope of return in them, and to remind them of their story as a people, and to help them see their place in that on-going story. Most importantly, the reality of God's continued control over history, and the exalted place of the Israelite people in that history, is emphasized for readers.
This reading, from chapter 43, presents an image of a "Second Exodus", with echoes of the Exodus recounted in the Torah, but described with a glory that would far outshine that first event. Isaiah is clearly anticipating a return from Exile to the Promised Land, something that in reality would be granted by Cyrus not long after Isaiah wrote. In The HarperCollins Study Bible, Dr. J.J.M. Roberts of Princeton Theological Seminary estimates the most likely years of composition to be 545-539 BCE; 539, coincidently, was the year Cyrus allowed a group of Jews to return to Jerusalem, as recounted in Ezra and Nehemiah.
In verses 16 and 17, Isaiah makes the explicit reference to the Exodus narrative, with the crossing of the Red Sea, and the defeat of the Egyptian chariots and Pharoah recounted. God will do this again, Isaiah promises, delivering the Israelites once more from a foreign power. But, Isaiah warns in verse 18, the Jewish people should not think this will be a simple replay of that earlier event; "Do not remember former things", the author writes, "I am about to do a new thing."
What differentiates this Second Exodus? Whereas the earlier Israelites were led out into a dangerous wilderness, and required the protection of God in the cloud during that forty years of wandering, Isaiah presents here a vision not of a wilderness, but a garden. A way will be made, waters will flow, the wild animals will be tamed, and through it all, God will be glorified.