Epiphany 5
Isaiah 6:1-13/Luke 5:1-11 

⁸ Then I heard the voice of my Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me."  ⁹ And He said, "Go, say to that people: 'Hear, indeed, but do not understand; See, indeed, but do not grasp.'  ¹⁰ Dull that people's mind, Stop its ears, And seal its eyes -- Lest, seeing with its eyes And hearing with its ears, It also grasp with its mind, And repent and save itself. I asked, “How long, my Lord?”-  Isaiah 6:8-10 (The Tanakh)   

The prophet Isaiah is a messenger of hard news.  Taken up into the divine presence, the prophet and the entire prophetic enterprise, is given authority to hear and proclaim a message of God’s purposes for God’s people. The message is not consoling, but disturbing. Those who anticipate the voice of a fretless parent will be shocked to hear instead the judgment of an almighty king. What Isaiah is given to say is haunting: instead of knowing there is only ignorance; instead of sight there is only blindness; instead of wholeness there is only fragmentation. This is what the people are to hear; this is how the people are destined to live: without the security or assurance of the God of their ancestors. Lest the people absolve themselves from their own waywardness, God instructs Isaiah in a comprehensive vision of human undoing. How long, my Lord is the only question Isaiah can muster. How long?

The Christian church has long recognized something that theologian Denys Turner calls, the ‘darkness of God’. The description is a startling one considering the proliferation of images of God as like the sun, as the one who shines in darkness. What is meant by ‘darkness of God’ is not the Jungian shadow side of human psychology: the side we choose not to see or recognize in ourselves: the corruptible alternative to the ‘normal’ dimension of our lives which we wear, like a mask. No, the darkness of God refers not to God’s dark side, as it were, but to the ineffable silence, the incomprehensible otherness of God which we cannot see or hear or know despite our best efforts or well-intentioned piety. This darkness is our unknowing. The ‘darkness of God’ is related to our confession of God as Creator who acts freely unrestrained by our intentions or desires. It is precisely as Creator that the ‘darkness of God’ is related to the undoing of human pretentions. This is the place where the prophet’s message meets the people of Israel. Their unknowing and God’s undoing gives focus to God’s unearned grace that directs the heart and mind of the human subject towards our destiny in human flourishing as a sign of divine friendship. But before it is a flourishing, it is first an undoing.

It is into such darkness that Isaiah is told the people of Israel, God’s people, are to dwell, at least for a time.  Why? Could not God simply zap them, and by extension, us, and make us all good and obedient people? In short, no; because we are made to be free, to live and love as directed by our desire for goodness and wholeness. This freedom is a sign of divine gift. So Isaiah instructs the people in a holy darkness in order that their vulnerability and the recognition of human limits may correlate eventually with a growth of absolute dependence on the mystery of God. We commonly call such dependence on the mystery of God, faith. Even in the midst of human undoing as we discover it in Isaiah, there is the hope of healing and restoration, of a “holy seed” that germinates in the stump that maybe the only thing left after the stripping away of human pretension. It is a fragile hope, a tenuous faith, but since both hope and faith along with love are how God elevates us to his divine presence, then we must be satisfied with what we receive and in what amount we receive them if we are ever to see, hear and know the fullness of life that is God.

Faith is an illumination that appears in darkness. Faith teaches us that we come to know that we do not know[1]. Within the ‘darkness of God’ we pray without knowing and speak without understanding; not just because we find God too hard to pray to or understand, but because in doing so we appropriate what George Steiner calls, ‘the deeper strangeness of grace’; a grace deep and strange as compared to the easily digestible and blatantly cheap language about God and our world that reduces everything to a bumper-sticker or an advertising slogan or worse, a consumable that is traded and sold in the marketplace of ideas. Our dependence on the mystery of God is the way of wisdom that is illumed by faith and directs us on our journey through the often difficult territory of human joy and suffering, of life and death.

What we learn on the way is that we cannot know who we are addressing in our prayers or through our worship until God reveals himself to us openly. Isaiah the prophet leaves us unsteady in these matters, inviting patience but not confidence in how God will finally be revealed even in the midst of darkness. Isaiah also teaches us that we should be careful not to run too quickly to a form of good news that we feel immunizes us from the impact of bad. We learn at the feet of the prophet that news we find hard to bear can teach us something of God’s otherness to us and our world, even as we confess through faith that our ignorance and human limitations is no barrier to God’s healing grace.  

Can we find good news in the midst of bad? In some way, that is the wrong question to ask. Perhaps better is this: what does our dependence on God look like? For we know that good news and bad come with unexpected consequences and often, unforeseen gifts. As such, our attention is on the character of God’s goodness that grows like a seed in our lives both in times of flourishing and when we are nothing but a stump. And our attention is on the kind of community that imitates God’s goodness through word and deed, through service and thanksgiving. As we learn the way of faith – the illumination that appears in darkness – we will learn the risk of vulnerability that places us in the trust of each other, and in our dependence on the mystery of God. The way forward may seem cloaked in darkness, but as Jesus reminds us in his invitation to the disciples, we can enter the ‘darkness of God’ without fear because we do not enter alone. Following Christ we enter God’s brilliant darkness as healed and loved.