Failure of Exile and Theological Interpretation (3)

Last week we started looking at the question of how to read Isaiah’s failed anticipations of restoration from exile as Christian scripture (part 1, part 2).

At this point in my life I remain skeptical of the value of creedal “narratives” to help us find our way, or of Trinitarian hermeneutics to do much better. In this, I recognize that I am stepping away from a broad and powerful stream of Christian biblical interpretation. So they’re probably right. You’ve been warned.

What we see happening in 2d and 3d Isaiah is a commitment to Israel’s God, and the faithfulness of Israel’s God, despite the failure of the prophetic word to materialize. Despite the fact that these are prophetic texts and not stories per se, I’d argue that the texts are engaged in a process of narratival reimagination. The telos of the story is the same (the glorification of Israel by her God), the faithfulness of the main character, God, is never called into question. But the other players and the plot itself will have to be reconfigured in light of recent developments.

There are myriad ways in which the issue of failed return from exile is picked up in the New Testament. The introduction of John the Baptist with the words of Isa 40 are an invitation to read the subsequent story of Jesus’ ministry as a fulfillment of 2d (and 3d) Isaiah’s vision of restoration from exile and/or Second Exodus.

We mustn’t miss the implications. The second and third rewritings of Isaiah’s hopes for return from exile were not the end of the narrative reimagination. Now the retelling itself is reconceived as occurring hundreds of years after the original prophecy was supposed to come to pass.

This Christian rereading of Isaiah requires both that the historical problem of non-fulfillment and the theological conviction of God’s faithfulness to his promises be fully in play. The prophecies will now be reread in light of the conviction that Jesus has brought about restoration, healing, transformation, and the restoration of the Davidic kingship.

To give a Christian reading of the Isaiah text is, in part, to refuse to stop reading it in its historical context. If we stop there and apply it to our lives we are truncating the process by which the story meets us today. It meets us through the claims of the NT writers that Jesus’ ministry is the means by which all these hopes are fulfilled.

We must reimagine the story as it comes to an unexpected turn in the first century, where the people are gathered without being drawn to Jerusalem, where the Messiah reigns without displacing the foreigners, where God provides deliverance without transferring ownership of Israel’s land.

Most of all, the story is now defined by the death of Jesus as the means for God’s great rescue operation. That narrative moment relativizes and transforms early expectations. This is, at heart, what it means to give a Christian rereading of these texts: to see how the Christ event not only fulfills, but embodies and especially transforms the expectations created by the OT telling of the story.

But the place where we started was in the realization that one of the most important expectations of the exile was that it was to be transformative. Those who returned were supposed to be newly and uniquely faithful to Israel’s God.

And for all the promises of Spirit and new creation, all the hopefulness of a transformation that breaks into the present, we don’t see the end of this yet. Why give a Christian reading if it isn’t any more ultimate than the earlier reading? What does it mean to be confronted by this text in our communities? What does it look like to apply it to our lives as, specifically, Christians?

Stay tuned.