Christian theologians often speak of the “scandal of particularity” that surrounds the gospel. The absurdity of God becoming incarnate in Christ within human history is hard to escape. In other words, it is a scandal to suggest that God somehow stepped into a particular moment in time, the heavens somehow opening like a window. It is scandalous that an unknowable God should somehow become so particularly known.
The prayer of Isaiah conveyed in chapter 64 is one that boldly confronts us with this very scandal. The particularity of the moment in which God, prophet, and the people of Israel are speaking is unmistakable: “Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down! That the mountains would quake at your presence” (64:1). This cry of longing and remembrance is one wrought out of a great and terrible history, the storied and convoluted relationship of a God called Yahweh and his chosen, wandering people. And yet, there are certainly many who, when reading these words, feel as if Isaiah has torn out their own storied and convoluted hearts and placed them upon the page: Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come nearer! Multiplying the scandal of this particular ancient longing is this Father who is as able to speak to a particular post-exilic people as He is to you and me, here and now.
Adding to this picture, Isaiah’s words strike me as those a person in Bethlehem could likely have been uttering on the night Christ was born (or you or me hundreds of years later). In the days of Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, the people of Israel were living in a period of silence. It had been over four hundred years since God had spoken of a coming redeemer and his forerunner through the prophet Malachi. Malachi had called the people again to anticipate and to be prepared for the day that was coming. But in the quiet nights of four hundred years, even the faithful stumble and doubt. How long had devoted pilgrims been repeating to themselves: “From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him” (64:4). Yet on doubt-ridden nights, the waiting was no doubt for them as wearying as it is today, the silence daunting, the longing unsilenceable, convinced it is we who are foul and repelling. “[Y]ou have hidden your face from us, and have melted us into the hand of our iniquity,” laments Isaiah (64:7).
Whether uttered aloud or groaned silently, how often our longings convey something of the same convoluted emotions—trust and fear, hope and dejection, frustration and guilt. Ours, too, are the cries of a desperate people, wrought with a sense of longing, burdened by a sense of shame. Isaiah’s next question—”How then can we be saved?”—is one we, too, might utter, at times cynically, accusingly; while other times whispered as a prayer or burdened confession (64:5).
Regardless, it is precisely here, in the darkness of post-exilic Jerusalem, in the night of God’s silence, or in the cry of one who is all too aware of the rift of sin, that the very particular cry for God to come down is met with the scandalous assurance of radical and particular belonging. Indeed, Isaiah concludes to God, “[E]ven if no one is calling your name, bestirring himself to take hold of you, because you have hidden your face from us, and melted us down by means of our iniquities, now, Yahweh, you are still our father! We are the clay, and you are our potter. All of us are the work of your hand!” (64:7-8). It is reminiscent of Bonhoeffer’s description of a mining accident and the hope of the Incarnation as the distinct sound of knocking to those trapped beneath the weight of the earth. There is someone coming whether we want him or not, and he is calling your name.
The great window of a torn-open heavens and the massive ladder of a God who descends are the expectant images that tell us the hopeful story of a God who is scandalously near—whether we want God to be near or not. Picturing this hope, our imaginations can run wild at the thought of quaking mountains, awesome deeds, and great reversals we did not expect. But so these windows and ladders are the stirring and expectant vessels of smaller and seemingly insignificant glimpses of a God among us. Even in the soul who can only partially admit that he is a wandering child is something of the radical reach of a Father’s love. In the company of a friend through cancer or the sting of death is the image of the one who is nearer than a friend.
In Isaiah’s particular cry is an invitation to pay attention to the unlikely and the unexpected in the great windows of history and the small windows of daily life. Isaiah’s particular cry is an invitation to hear the cries of those before us as well as the cries of our hearts, which may just be answered by the cry of a God who hears particularly. Indeed, how scandalous is the image of the infant Christ looking up at his young mother, his own cries joining humanity’s own? There was a particular moment in history when humanity heard God weep. And there will be a day in history when this same Christ will dry every tear from our eyes.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
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