Life in the Human Order - Isaiah 40:21-31

Paul Tillich, writing in The Shaking of the Foundations, discussed the two orders in which humanity lives: the human order and the divine order. The human order, according to Tillich, is primarily the order of living and dying. Humankind's experience of melancholy, fed by the awareness of one's fading and perishing nature, reminds one of the transitory nature of life. What a downer! It can be compared to living life in exile, away from all that is familiar. But can it be compared to the Babylonian exile in which many of the Children of Israel lived for more than a generation and to whom Isaiah spoke?
Contemporary biblical scholarship is beginning to transform our ideas about what life was like during the exile. It turns out that not all, or even most of Israel was taken to Babylon. It was mainly the landowners and educated who were forced to leave their homeland. And for those who lived in Babylon, they had relative freedom as far as how they lived their lives. They were even free to worship in their own familiar way. So, imagine how difficult it must have been when someone would suggest that they seek to return to their homeland. Jerusalem lay in ruins and was a desolate place. Who in his/her right mind would want to go back? This makes us think a bit differently about Walter Brueggemann's concept of "numbness" that kept people from responding to the prophetic message. While some may have been immune from prophetic calls for hope and restoration due to a sense of personal loss and a longing for home, others were numb to the call because they could think of no earthly reason to want to return home. After all, Babylon was not home, but it wasn't faded and ugly Judah, either.
Still, the prophet who is recorded in II Isaiah bids the people to form a vision of a restored homeland and a renewed sense of being God's people. He bids them to think of Tillich's other construct, the divine order. The divine order can cause us to be dissatisfied with what has always been and can bid us to imagine a very different world. That is what Isaiah was getting at; "there is a new way of thinking and living. And if thinking of such a place seems beyond your grasp, there is One who can help you imagine it."
When each day's news brings bad tidings of thousands more layoffs and gloom and doom, some may find it insulting to be challenged to imagine a new world order. Isaiah dealt with the same unreceptive type of audience as a prophet will find today, but the word continued to go out, until, with the cooperation of a disinterested King Cyrus, the Israelites were permitted to go back home. Surely, what they found waiting for them must have been demoralizing. But rebuilding has to start somewhere. It begins with a vision of what can be.
Life in the human order does not have to be without hope, because there is a vision of life in the divine order that we have not really attempted to get our minds around. Who would dare proclaim such a message in such difficult times as these? Who indeed!