Tuesday,
12/11/12
Our
first reading today is from Chapter Forty of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. It
tells how in the year 530 B.C. God’s messenger told the Jews that their seventy
years of captivity in Babylon had ended, and God would smooth the way for them
to journey back to rebuild Jerusalem.
An
odd thing is that there is a hundred and eighty year time gap between the
previous Chapter Thirty- Nine and this Chapter Forty. Chapter Thirty-Nine went
back to 710 B.C. when Babylon was a new nation springing up in Mesopotamia, and
its king sent an embassy to make his first contact with King Hezekiah in
Jerusalem. At that time Hezekiah showed off his treasury and armory to Babylon’s
embassy, and Isaiah told the king that he had done a foolish thing. Isaiah told
King Hezekiah that a hundred years in the future Babylon would send an army to
capture Jerusalem’s wealth. That didn’t bother King Hezekiah. He said, “At
least there will be peace and quiet in my lifetime.”
If
you are following this story you will ask, “Why is there an hundred and eighty
year time lapse between Chapter Thirty-Nine and Chapter Forty?” The answer
points to a decision made by a group of seventy Jewish scholars working in
Alexandria Egypt in 200 B.C. They were gathering the separate scrolls from the
various ancient prophets, fitting them into one continuous Bible text. Now the
scrolls with the prophesies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were clearly
marked, but there was no identification on the wonderful prophetic words from
530 B.C. At a loss for what to do with those grand scrolls, they bundled them
up with the much earlier scrolls from Isaiah. We do not have the name of
wonderful prophet and poet who was God’s messenger for this Chapter Forty and
the following chapters. We usually refer to him as Second Isaiah.
Second
Isaiah’s message is that through seventy years of captivity the Jews had paid
for all their sins, and they had become a fresh holy people whom God welcomes in
his embrace. For us the message is that even if we have sinned badly in the
past, God wants us to put all that behind us. God says, “Comfort, give comfort
to my people.” He tells us our guilt is expiated, and he welcomes us home.
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