Isaiah 63:7-9
“Who is this coming from Edom,
from Bozrah in garments stained crimson?
Who is this so splendidly robed,
marching in his great might?”
“It is I, announcing vindication,
mighty to save.”
With these words, Isaiah begins his 63rd chapter. The LORD has been in Bozrah, Edom (modern day Jordan to the southeast of the Dead Sea) trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. His robes are stained with the evidence of his battle and he has done the work alone. “[M]y own arm brought me victory,/and my wrath sustained me” (63:5).
There was a day when this kind of language seemed to make people with higher education very uncomfortable. We didn’t like the reminder that our faith, and the faiths from which we have come, had been implicated in horrific acts of violence. We were embarrassed by the church’s complicity in war and there was a strong bent away from that and toward nonviolence.
Now, it does not seem so strange. After George Floyd, after Breonna Taylor, after the innumerable other black and people of color who have suffered violently and publicly, after the unveiling of the American id that has happened since Obama’s presidency, it seems we have begun to become comfortable with the language of violence. I have had friends I would have assumed were some kind of functional pacifist express a willingness to take up arms in Ukraine against Putin’s invasion. When someone can honestly and publicly make the case for Christian Nationalism, educated white folk like me kind of go, “Yeah, I know it’s a little embarrassing for me, but I’m also not gonna be mad at my brothers and sisters if they want to engage in a little imaginative revenge. Maybe those Jews in Babylon had a point with the babies and the rocks. Maybe some Tarantino-esque imagery isn’t the worst possible thing.” In private conversation we can nod along with someone talking about why we had to encounter suburban American racism in the horror genre (see Jordan Peele’s Get Out), but when it comes to what we hear in church, read from the pulpit, it seems like we’re not there yet.
Is that why this passage starts at verse 7, flinching from the brutality of 1-6? Is that why it doesn’t include verse 10, neglecting ownership of our own rebellion? Are we just trying to hear the smarmy and whitewashed words of the prophet Isaiah on this First Sunday after Christmas?
7 I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord,
the praiseworthy acts of the Lord,
because of all that the Lord has done for us
and the great favor to the house of Israel
that he has shown them according to his mercy,
according to the abundance of his steadfast love.
8 For he said, “Surely they are my people,
children who will not act deceitfully,”
and he became their savior
9 in all their distress.
It was no messenger or angel
but his presence that saved them;
in his love and pity it was he who redeemed them;
he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.
Isaiah 63:7-9 (NRSVUE)
This passage comes to us in the echo of the destruction of the Temple (63:18). Isaiah envisions a new Exodus, a return from Babylon through the wasteland west of Babylon (40:3-5, 41:1-20), but there is no specific Moses figure. Instead, we have a new sort of leader. A suffering servant. A messiah who does, in fact, lead and save but he does it with the very presence of the Lord in him. The Spirit of the Lord is upon him (61:1) and enables him to do and to suffer things with a holiness that no mere mortal could muster (52:13-53:12).
But now this savior figure is identified more and more with the Lord in a way that would have been hard for the Jews to understand. What does it mean, for example, when 63:9 says, “וּמַלְאַךְ פָּנָיו הוֹשִׁיעָם”? Most mass-market translations (NIV, ESV, KJV, NKJV, NASB) go with something like, “the angel of his presence saved them.” This is also how the RSV reads, although interestingly the NRSV pulls away from the theological implication that there is an angel of God’s presence here, i.e. a personal manifestation of the LORD that is doing the saving. They choose a softer translation that leans in the presence, but away from the angel.
I guess either way, we are left with the sense that the presence of the Lord is the thing. He shares affliction. He abounds with favor, mercy, and love. Later on, Isaiah even goes so far as to say that if Abraham and Jacob/Israel were to forget them–even if the very source of their earthly identity were challenged and forgotten, “you, O Lord, are our father/our Redeemer from of old is your name” (63:16). There is an identity in God that penetrates deeper than culture or ethnicity or sexuality, while embracing us in all that we are. Knowing who we are in God gives us our true name because he is the one who saves us, not by violence, but by his presence.
I know I just made a big leap to the New Testament there, but I couldn’t help it. John the Revelator picks up on this passage and has the Rider of the White Horse leading the army of the Holy Ones (19:11-16). His robe is dipped in blood and he makes war, though really only against the power, the immorality, and the economic systems that all trade in idolatry over righteousness. At the same time, we are promised a new name on a white stone (2:17) if we will resist those powers and overcome by our repentance.
What is the key to all of this? God’s personal presence. Isaiah says angel (sorry, NRSV…). John says it is the ascendant Christ returning to rescue his beloved. But today is the 8th day of the season of Christmas. It concludes the octave of the Nativity and in many churches and traditions, today will be Holy Name Sunday, a moment of turning to the circumcision of Christ when it became clear that God had not abandoned or left his people. Instead, he became one of them. He shared our affliction. He took on the burden and joy of Jewishness and received the name Jesus. Yeshua. In obedience to the angel, this messenger of God’s presence–God’s very presence itself–was given the name of the one who led Israel into the land of promise after their great Exodus.
And he will do the same for us. The root of Christian opposition to violence has never been that no violence is necessary. It is that God-in-Christ is the one who will fight those battles. Our opposition to racism and oppression is not because we want to see race or culture eliminated or ignored. It is because we trust that our God will catch up all good things into his coming Kingdom in which we bear his name.
The unbearable–whether prejudice, persecution, injustice, or violence–can be born when we are marked with the name of the one who has already born all on the cross. But those who would remove the “gracious deeds” and “praiseworthy acts” of God from the specific, incarnate name of the child Jesus will soon discover that they have neither Jesus nor the good work which flows from him.
And in light of the historical tragedy which was the destruction of the Temple, we see the Holy Family fulfilling the Law in the Temple and offering for the salvation of all humanity the One who would become our Holy of Holies. Jesus’s very body is now the enfleshed and incarnate presence of God in which we come to meet the eternal Lord. The “angel of his presence that saves” is much more than a vague Hebrew phrase. It is the LORD himself in this squirming and squealing child, fulfilling all righteousness and receiving his name in the arms of his holy mother. Let us give thanks for the very presence which saves us and which constantly challenges and pursues us in love.