The pairing of words in Isaiah 61 comes to mind often, poetry to a world of contrasts. Isaiah describes a coming seismic, paradoxical shift in the way the world operates, at the hands of one who will:

bring good news to the oppressed,

and bind up the broken-hearted,

who will proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

who will provide for those who mourn

and give them beauty for ashes,

the oil of gladness instead of mourning,

the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

Isaiah’s promising description of life as shalom is not a public relations campaign promising the harder realities of life will soon be forgotten, earlier recollections of despair erased. Isaiah’s promising words and the gospel that later brings these promises to life are not catchy political slogans. Instead, they sing a very unflattering, enigmatic song about a very meek Son of God who appears on the scene of a fairly unimpressive city—not the Jerusalem of royalty and fanfare, but the back streets of Bethlehem—a savior who exits shamefully on a hill out of town, crucified between criminals. My toddler’s ‘Storybook Bible’ tells it this way: “So the wise men followed the star out of the big city, along the road, into the little town of Bethlehem. They followed the star through the streets of Bethlehem, out of the nice part of town, through the not-so-nice part of town, into the really-not-nice-at-all part of town, down a little dirt track, until it stopped right over… a little house. But wait. It wasn’t a palace. And there weren’t any guards. Or servants. Or flags. Or red carpets. Or trumpets. Or anything. Did they get it wrong? Or was this what God meant?”

Was this what God meant? I want to suggest that this is a question for philosophers as much as for two year-olds, a question for the oppressed and the brokenhearted as much as for captives on the verge of being set free, and exiles holding the heartbreaking sensation of home under their feet once again. Was this what God meant? If Isaiah’s glimpsing of shalom is not an image campaign or a political slogan attempting to cover over Israel’s years of loss, what is it then? If beauty doesn’t erase ashes, does it sit with them, does it hold them? Or is it just an exasperating look at a fatalism of opposites?

Was this what God meant? How do we hold these paradoxical times of life—beauty and ashes, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, captivity and release, thankfulness and a faint spirit? Whether we ask as the brokenhearted soul looking out with disillusion or as a beaming bride and groom standing on the promise of new hope, an answer is hard to put into words.

But this is why I love the concept of shalom that Isaiah gives us in words but perhaps even more powerfully in image and substance. Isaiah is not necessarily attempting to explain anything away. Beauty and comfort and release and gladness and joy are indeed proclaimed, but it all comes as the promise of a God who is somehow present in the midst of Israel’s complicated, difficult, dark and beautiful realities. Peering at Jesus in that little house in the less than savory section of Bethlehem, the wise men aren’t attempting to justify the strange or dark realities of Jesus’s birth either. A king without a palace. A mother without a husband. A Light in the midst of the dark streets of Bethlehem. Despite the way it looks, they know they have seen the stars align in this child. And, dark though it is, they are giving thanks.

The promise of God’s shalom is not a thin attempt to distract us from our own darkness or a flimsy pat on the back for the profound brokenness of the world. It is not an image campaign to make us feel better, but the promise of one who can somehow hold it all. It is the promise of one who, somehow, is already about the profound work of our restoration and healing, which also, will one day be complete. Hundreds of years after Isaiah gave us this glimpse of shalom, that child from Bethlehem, where the hopes and fears of all the years intersect, stands up in a local synagogue, reading these very words of Isaiah, and announces that he is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s lyric. Jesus is the promise of shalom, the one who is somehow able to hold ashes and still offer us beauty, who both mourns beside us and who dries our very eyes, who embodies the good news to the oppressed and is even now about the work of restoration in the deepest sense of human flourishing we could never imagine. In the phrase of fifteenth century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, Christ is the very embodiment of the moment of coincidentia oppositorum—the impossible moment when opposites meet. Might our hopes and fears of all the years rest in him tonight.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) “No Place Like Home,” This American Life, episode 520, March 14, 2014. Ira Glass tells the story from the point of view of Calgary.

(2) See Isaiah 61, particularly 61:1-3.

(3) “Dark though it is” is a line from the W.S. Merwin poem, “Thanks,” written in 1927.

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