The Isaiah Project: Chapter 58, or, The Price of Simplicity

An interesting chapter today, in which we return to one of the prophecy's very first themes. Enjoy, and God bless.

1. Call out loud, don’t hold back — like a trumpet, lift your voice on high and tell my people about their rebellion. Tell Jacob’s house about their sins.

2. But it’s me they hunt for day by day, and take pleasure in knowing my pathways — just like a nation that does righteousness, and doesn’t abandon the justice of its god. They ask for righteous justice and delight in drawing near to god.

3. 'Why did we fast if you weren’t going to see it? We abased our souls, but you took no notice.' Look: on your fasting day you seek pleasure, and you make your usual claims on your hired hands.

4. Look: it’s for the sake of accusations and arguments that you fast, so you can beat each other with fists of evil. You don’t fast this day to make your voice heard on high.

5. Is this the kind of fasting I chose? The day when a man abases his soul, to bow his head like a reed and strew burlap and ashes beneath himself? Is that what you call a fast, the day of God’s gracious acceptance?

6. Isn’t this the fast I chose? To break apart the fetters of evil; to unstrap the bands of the yoke and bring liberty to those broken down? To lift away every yoke?

7. Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry, and letting the downtrodden poor come into your house? Covering anyone you see naked, and not concealing yourself from your own flesh and blood?

8. Then your light will burst forth like dawn breaking, the bloom of your health flush swiftly to the full, your righteousness precede you — the majesty of God will be the reward you reap.

9. Then you’ll call out, and God will answer. You’ll shout out loud and he’ll say, ‘here I am.’ If you clear away the yoke from among you, and finger-pointing, and empty proclamations of depravity;

10. If you stretch forth your soul to anyone hungry and satisfy the soul of the abased, then in the pitch black dark your light will rise. Your dusk will be like high noon.

11. Then God will guide you unceasingly, satisfy your soul in the dry heat and put meat on your bones. You’ll be like an irrigated garden, like a source of water whose waters will never fall short.

12. Those who come forth from within you will build up the deserts of ages past, foundations rising from generation to generation. You’ll be called the mender of broken things, who restores paths to dwell in.

13. If you turn back your steps on the sabbath from doing whatever you please on my sacred day; if you call the sabbath a luxury, God’s sacred day, majestic; if you choose his majesty above making your own paths and pursuing your own pleasure and proclaiming your own proclamations;

14. Then you will luxuriate in God. I will give you earth’s high peaks to ride on, and the inheritance of your father Jacob to eat: God’s mouth has proclaimed this thing.

Since we all know, from our own and our nation's experience, of some pleasures that are canceled by their costs, and of some that result in unredeemable losses and miseries, it is natural to wonder if there may not be such phenomena as net pleasures, pleasures that are free or without a permanent cost. And we know that there are. These are the pleasures that we take in our own lives, our own wakefulness in this world, and in the company of other people and other creatures -- pleasures innate in the Creation and in our own good work. It is in these pleasures that we possess the likeness to God that is spoken of in Genesis.

--Wendell Berry, "Economy and Pleasure"

Why is it costly for us to be as we were made to be, and nothing more? It seems absurd, but there it is. This is among the surest indicators I know that something is wrong with everything.

It may be there is no "why": it may be there is simply the fact of the fall. But I note some potential reasons -- chief among them our excessive pleasures and misguided hopes, which render it impossible to recognize how good the basics are. The compulsive stimulation of scrolling through Twitter short-circuits our neurons and makes a long evening of reading feel like torment rather than nourishment. Candy overloads our senses and leaves us with no taste for wholesome food. The alcoholic loses his relish for the simple clarity of alert perception. Everywhere we are seduced into trading away the richness of being for some corrupt promise of more: more flavor, more delight, more enthusiasm. Bitterly, we realize too late that more only begets the desire for more, and an itching dissatisfaction with what is.

In this chapter Isaiah returns, near the closing of his prophecy, to a theme with which he began in Chapter 1: "What good are all your sacrifices to me?’ says God. ‘I’m stuffed full. Offerings of goats; milk from fat cows; bull’s blood; sheep and rams: I take no pleasure in them. . . . When you stretch out your palms I’ll hide my eyes from you. Even when you multiply your prayers, you’ll get no audience from me. Your hands are full of blood." Now at last, after a wayward Israel has suffered a violent downfall, Isaiah describes what it will be like for them to worship at last once again in spirit and in truth: "Isn’t this the fast I chose? To break apart the fetters of evil; to unstrap the bands of the yoke and bring liberty to those broken down? To lift away every yoke? Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry, and letting the downtrodden poor come into your house? Covering anyone you see naked, and not concealing yourself from your own flesh and blood?"

Do these things, and at last "your light will burst forth like dawn breaking, the bloom of your health flush swiftly to the full, your righteousness precede you — the majesty of God will be the reward you reap." Very well, but a reader who has followed this project from the beginning will know what an ordeal it took for Israel to realize the necessity of such sincerity or even hope to pursue it. God promised in Chapter 6 to strip humanity down like a fire burning through trees, until the "holy seed" might be found in the "stump." And true to his word, he scourged Israel with devastation and disapointment, with dislocation and defeat and exile in a strange land far from home. A grieving survivor of such torment might well ask: why did it have to be so hard?

I cannot presume to answer that question in full, but I will note this much: the only way for the alcoholic to delight in sobriety again is for him to have the bottle ripped from his hands. The only way to regain your attention span is to slog through a few days or even weeks in which you suffer boredom to the point of tears. The comfortable priests and wealthy leaders of Jerusalem had come to love using worship and fasting as a weapon, "for the sake of accusations and arguments" so they could "beat each other with fists of evil." They were addicted to a kind of hyper-righteousness, a perverse game of one-upsmanship whose aim was not goodness in itself but the sick, gnawing satisfaction of being better than the next guy.

God tore the intoxicating liquor of self-satisfaction out of his people's hands and gave them again the cool, clear water of receiving and showing mercy. So may we all be deprived of the excess which deprives us of ourselves, and returned at the last to the state of contentment which needs nothing more than the good that inheres in creation. Yes, and more than contentment: for the grand joke at the end is that the excellence of what we were made to be is not merely satisfactory, but better than the most extravagant overindulgence we could ever go chasing after. The thing to which we must at last be stripped down is ourselves.