The Burning Coal and the Child Who Was Coming

God sent prophets to his people. A prophet was not a fortune-teller. He did not sit in a booth and tell people what was going to happen to them for a coin. A prophet was a person God sent to God’s own people, with something to say — and it was almost always something they did not want to hear. A prophet was not a stranger shouting at foreigners. He lived in the town he was talking to. The people he warned were his neighbors, and the king he warned was his own king, and when they got tired of him they knew exactly where he lived. God sent word by the hand of his prophets, getting up early to send his messengers, because he wanted to spare his people — and they sneered at the messengers, and made nothing of the words, and mocked the prophets. Prophets did sometimes say what had not happened yet. But mostly they said what was happening right then, out loud, when everybody else had agreed not to mention it.

There were a great many of them, and one of them was a man of Jerusalem named Isaiah, who was a prophet for a very long time — through the reigns of four kings of Judah. And it started in the year King Uzziah died.

Isaiah was in the house of the Lord, and he saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the whole house was full of his glory. Above the throne stood burning creatures called seraphs. Each one had six wings: with two of them it covered its face, and with two it covered its feet, and with two it flew. And they were calling to one another across the room: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of armies. The whole earth is full of his glory.” And the sound of their voices shook the great doorway of the house, and the house filled up with smoke. And Isaiah, standing in the smoke, cried out: “Woe to me! I am cut to the heart. I am a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips — and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of armies.” Then one of the seraphs flew to him. It had a live coal in a pair of tongs, lifted off the altar. And it touched Isaiah’s mouth with the coal, and said: “Look — this has touched your lips. It will take away the wrong you have done, and make your sins clean.” And then Isaiah heard the voice of the Lord, asking nobody in particular: “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us to this people?” And Isaiah said the words that made him a prophet: “Here I am. Send me.”

And then God told him what the job was, and it was not a kind one. “Go and tell this people: you will hear and hear, and never understand; you will look and look, and never see. This people’s heart has gone dull. Their ears are heavy, and they have shut their own eyes — so that they will not see, or hear, or understand, and turn round, and let me heal them.” Isaiah asked the question anybody would ask: “How long, Lord?” And the answer was: “Until the cities are empty and nobody lives in them, and the houses stand with nobody inside, and the land is left bare.” And then, at the very end of that hard answer, one more thing: a tenth of them would still be there. Like a terebinth tree cut down, or an acorn dropped out of its cup. Something small, left over, still alive.

So Isaiah went, and for the rest of his life he told his own city the truth about itself. He sang them a song about a farmer and a vineyard. The farmer had a hill of good ground, and he dug it and put a hedge round it and planted the finest vines he could buy, and built a watchtower in the middle, and cut a winepress out of the rock. And then he waited for grapes. And it grew thorns. And when everyone listening had agreed that the farmer had done everything a farmer could do, Isaiah told them whose vineyard it was: “The vineyard of the Lord of armies is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are the plant he loved. He waited for fair judging, and got law-breaking. He waited for people doing right, and heard a cry for help.” And after that came the woes, one after another, like somebody counting. “Woe to those who join house to house and field to field, until there is no room for anybody else, and you live alone in the land. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who make darkness light and light darkness, who make bitter sweet and sweet bitter. Woe to those who let a guilty man off for a bribe, and take from an innocent man what is his.”

And God’s own complaint was not that they had stopped going to the house of the Lord. They had not stopped. They were there all the time, with armfuls of offerings. “What use to me is the pile of your sacrifices? I have had enough of burnt rams. Your incense is horrible to me. My soul hates your feast days. When you stretch out your hands I will look the other way, and if you say a hundred prayers I will not listen — because your hands are full of blood.” “Wash yourselves. Get clean. Take the wrong you are doing out from in front of my eyes. Stop doing it. Learn to do good. Go looking for what is right. Rescue the one being wronged. Speak up for the child with no father, and stand up for the widow.” And then, in the middle of all that anger, the offer: “Come, let us talk this out, says the Lord. Though your sins are purple, I will make them white as snow. Though they are scarlet, I will make them white as wool.” Hardly anybody listened. God had told Isaiah on the first day that hardly anybody would.

But Isaiah is not remembered for his warnings. He is remembered for his promises. And the first of them was given to a frightened king who had just refused to ask for it. Two kings were marching on Jerusalem together, and when the news came to the palace, King Ahaz and all his people shook the way trees in a wood shake when the wind goes through them. And God sent Isaiah out to meet the king at the pool on the upper road, by the field where the washermen work, and to bring his own son along with him, and to say: “Stay calm. Do not be afraid, and do not let your heart go soft over these two smoking sticks.” And then God offered Ahaz something nobody else is ever offered: “Ask the Lord your God for a sign. Ask for it as deep as you like, or as high as you like.” And Ahaz would not. He said, very politely: “I will not ask. I will not put the Lord to the test.” So Isaiah gave him a sign anyway. “Listen, house of David. Is it not enough for you to wear people out? Must you wear my God out as well? Then the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look: a virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and you will call his name Immanuel.” Immanuel means God is with us.

And after that the promises kept coming, and they got bigger. “The people who are walking in the dark have seen a great light. On the ones living in the land where the shadow of death lies, a light has shone.” And then this: “A child has been born for us, and a son has been given to us. The government is on his shoulder, and his name is called Messenger of Great Counsel — for I will bring peace to the rulers, peace and health to him.” “His rule will be great, and his peace will have no end. He will sit on the throne of David and rule his kingdom, and hold it up with fair judging and with doing right, from now on and for ever. The Lord of armies will do this himself, because he wants it done.”

Then Isaiah said where that child would come from, and he said it like a gardener. “A rod will come out of the root of Jesse, and a flower will come up out of his root. And the Spirit of God will rest on him: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of good counsel and strength, the spirit of knowing God and standing in awe of him.” Jesse was David’s father — the old farmer at Bethlehem with all those sons, the one whose youngest boy was out with the sheep when the prophet came. That family had sat on the throne for hundreds of years, and it was going to lose it. And Isaiah looked at the old root of it and said a green shoot was coming. “He will not judge a man by the look of him, or settle a case by what people have been saying. He will judge the poor man’s case fairly, and stand up for the lowly people of the earth.”

And then Isaiah described the world that king would be king of, and it is the strangest and the loveliest thing he ever said. “The wolf will feed beside the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the bull and the lion will eat together — and a little child will be leading them. The cow and the bear will graze side by side, and their babies will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like an ox. And a baby will put his hand over the snake’s hole, and nothing will happen to him.” “They will do no harm. They will spoil nothing at all on the whole of my holy mountain — because the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, the way the water covers the sea.”

And there is something else Isaiah said that is not like any of the rest. It is not a warning and it is not a picture of a kingdom. It is a handful of words for people to say about a man. This is what the words say. “Who believed what we told them? He came up in front of us like a little plant, like a root out of dry ground. He had no shape and no glory to him. We looked at him and there was nothing to look at. Nobody honored him. He was a man of pain, who knew all about being ill, and people turned their faces away when he went by — and we thought he was being punished.” “But it was our wrongdoing that wounded him, and our sins that made him ill. The hard lesson that brought us peace fell on him, and by his bruises we were healed. We had all wandered off like sheep, every one of us down his own path — and the Lord let all of it come down on him.” “And he did not argue. He was led away like a sheep to be killed, and like a lamb standing in front of the man who cuts off its wool, he never opened his mouth.” And then Isaiah says it in his own voice: his life was taken from the earth, and it was for the wrongs of my people that he was led to his death — and he had done nothing wrong himself, and there was never a lie in his mouth. And after the pain of his soul, he will be shown light; and he will carry the sins of the many. That is all Isaiah says.

Isaiah said a great deal more. Warnings to every country he had ever heard of. Songs about the day the Lord makes a feast for all the peoples on his mountain and wipes the tears off every face. And the comfort, which never really stops: “Comfort my people. Comfort them, says God. Speak to the heart of Jerusalem.” And a voice shouting somewhere out in the desert to get a road ready — fill in every valley, flatten every hill, straighten the bends, because the glory of the Lord is coming and everybody alive is going to see it. And the promise for people who are tired out: “Those who wait for God will get their strength back. They will grow new feathers like eagles. They will run and not get tired, and walk and not go hungry.” Isaiah told his own people, long before it happened, that Jerusalem would be emptied out and carried off to Babylon — and that they would come home again afterwards. He did not live to see either one.