The passage from the Prophet Isaiah is one of the best loved in the Bible. In Jewish tradition, the servant has been identified as the Prophet Isaiah himself, as well as the whole people of Israel. Later, early Christians similarly saw Jesus as the servant as well as the servant symbolizing the mission of the whole church. It is a beautiful lesson that in a few short sentences, expands a destiny with limited perspective into a universal vision encompassing all of humanity.
It would have been justifiable for Isaiah to be quite discouraged and to feel that he had labored in vain making scant progress. The political realities that Isaiah faced would have provided an ample feast for a cynic. Just as he began to feel sorry for himself and letting a mask of bitterness protect his wounds, Isaiah grasped that God was leading him into a much larger and different reality and he began to trust in God’s strength rather than succumbing to his own weaknesses. He knew that a God who promised Abraham and Sarah that their descendants would be as numerous as grains of sand on the seashore and that through them all the peoples of the earth would be blessed was ultimately stronger than the power of the current dominant empire. Isaiah began to realize that the God, who had freed his ancestors from the Pharaoh and the Egyptian army, was also able to free the people of his time from their oppressors too. Isaiah, like Moses, was lifted up from the gloom of his present discouragement and the heavy clouds of struggle and brought up into the clear sunlight of a mountaintop, where God leveled all the boundaries and walls of human selfishness and exploitation. As Isaiah rose to God’s great challenge , Israel in turn began to see itself as Isaiah, and the mission of Israel and the prophet merged.
Last and this week's Gospel have dealt with Jesus' baptism and the beginning of Jesus' ministry. It seems anti-climax after the Christmas celebrations. There were no choirs of angels at the Jordan, and no heavenly star for foreign visitors to follow. John baptizedJesus along with some others, and then moved down the river baptizing another group of people. Another day, another place, Jesus, seemed to be almost too casual about choosing disciples. If one seemed to show some interest, one was welcomed, if one wanted to help, a place was made. While later editors seemed to obscure it, Jesus' close disciples were both men and women. They came from varied backgrounds and could not have all been convivial with one another. However Jesus kept them together because Jesus was always expanding, enlarging, and holding up possibilities in which personal annoyances paled in comparison. That what was so refreshing about Jesus. Jesus swept the burdens and heavy fog of old arguments. Jesus led his followers into the sunlight, and up mountains of new perspectives. The disciples came to understand that Jesus was on a mission to bring the light of God to the world and no one was ever automatically written off.
Tomorrow is a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. I could not have picked better lessons for today. Like Isaiah, King could have succumbed and turned bitter and inward. King could have emphasized the mundane, the stuff the world gets hung up on. He could have emphasized being pelted by stones or hounded by dogs. He could have drawn back and nursed his wounds with narrow ideological rhetoric. Instead, he drew his inspiration from the Biblical record and rose to the occasion. King called not just black people, not just poor people, not just Southern people, not just people in whatever category you want to create. King offered a message and a vision for all people. The real legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. involves a vision thoroughly grounded in the signs of God's commonwealth of creation, a vision not necessarily apparent to the world. In his struggles, king realized the hand of God at work, calling attention to the signs of love in action, of moving forward, of reconciling, and of building a greater society than envisioned by any ordinary politician running for reelection, a society that only makes sense in terms of signs, of miracles, of the grace of the living God.
King had the conviction of the Biblical prophets, that when called to God's larger mission, people of faith can rise to the occasion. The good news is that God continually offers us a revelation like one offered Isaiah, or the early disciples, or Martin Luther King. God offers us an ever-expanding mission of hope to all humanity, and with it, we can climb mountains, we can see over mountains, and we can even move them.
It is when the mission of the prophet Isaiah and Israel merged, when the mission of Jesus and the church are bonded together, when the prophets and people of God of every age rise up to bond themselves with God’s vision that miracles happen in every age, in every century, in every decade, here in Ithaca and throughout the world. 