Proper 33: Isaiah 65:17-25

Isaiah 65:17-25

65:17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
65:18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
65:19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.
65:20 No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
65:21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
65:22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
65:23 They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD-- and their descendants as well.
65:24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.
65:25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent--its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.

Comment:
I’ve always been taken by the thought and the possibility of newness, of novelty to the point of a rupture with the old. This is partly the reason that the text for my wedding was one very close to verse 17, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:18) My research into the different trajectories of the messianic idea – the inflationary and the deflationary traditions – have pushed me to think seriously about the idea of the unredeemablity of the world, such that eschatology would be a break without continuity, the end of this world as the condition for the next. Does such a thinking lead only to a politics “whose method,” according to Benjamin, “must be called nihilism”? Or, conversely, does the thinking of a (minimal) continuity require a politics whose method must be called liberalism?

This question does not need to be settled in order to read these texts, but it does give some sense of the difference between the possible destinies of a Christian and a Jewish interpretation; which also happens to reverse the political stakes. The Christian reading would be one in which the concrete references are transposed into an eschatological future. The houses would adorn streets of gold and the vineyards produce only the finest wine. The Jewish, on the other hand would hear these texts resonate among the houses and the vineyards of historical existence. These are, of course, caricatures and yield no lasting hermeneutical power, but it does attest to differences.

The text speaks of a redemption in which the injustices of the past are remedied. But it does not begin totally anew. Creation is the stopping point. The residues of created life are not erased in the interest of a complete novelty: death is not overcome, but deferred, labour is not superfluous, but immediately productive – from the land and from the body, predators are not now prey, but docile vegetarians. The exception is the serpent – the serpent continues on exactly as since Genesis: “The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.” (3:14)

Redemption is thus neither a radical newness: that would be re-creation; nor a total continuity: that would be the opposite of redemption. Perhaps this is why it is said of the messianic era that it will be like this one with only a slight adjustment.