Hope and Forgiveness Under Captivity

Isaiah 55:1-9

The background of captivity and exile for these verses is important. It is one thing for those in power to sing about the justice of God and about their nation being a light to the world. But here, deutero-Isaiah speaks of God's steadfast love and everlasting covenant with the people - a people defeated and exiled and returned to the kind of slavery from which they were delivered in Egypt. To speak of God's steadfastness and love in this context is daring and unexpected.

But it is also a song of comfort and reassurance: come and drink and eat, you don't need money or to work for what God offers. While all around you you are ruled by money and markets and demands and exchange, God offers what is God's freely, without price. Even David, so long ago a warrior and king, is lifted up as still meaningful - "you still have a nation," deutero-Isaiah seems to be saying, "you still have an identity as a people, you are still unique and special and beloved." And then, as if to glory in the inversion deutero-Isaiah is creating here, the writer shouts that nations they are not aware of will run to them, that God is working beyond them to bring new people to them (as a rescue from the Babylonians, or referring to the Babylonians themselves as having been brought to the Israelites to learn something from them?). Even in the midst of enslavement and exile, God is working to bring people together.

Who are the wicked here? The Babylonians? Israelite exiles who have abandoned their religion for that of their captors? Hebrew or Babylonian overlords who deal unjustly with their charges? We don't know, but are assured that God's forgiveness extends even to them - should they turn from unrighteousness.

It takes extraordinary suffering, sometimes, to cultivate an awareness of forgiveness. Profound hardship can sometimes (hopefully) lead to a profound forgiveness - a forgiveness so deep that it mirrors a divine compassion, and is articulated as God's own pardon.