THE PROPHETS ARE not the first biblical voices I turn to when hope is in short supply. Rather, reading them, I often think: Here we are again. Then as now, society and the world are barreling full speed toward devastation. Those in power put their faith in all the wrong places, followed by crowds of misguided people. Imagining how this will further unspool leads me to the edge of despair.
Yet, when I dug into the passages from the prophet Isaiah in this month’s readings, I found hope. If all were already lost, there would be no point to the prophet’s work. Instead, Isaiah proclaims that individual and social change are and continue to be possible — and then points the way, as Daniel Berrigan explains in his poetic commentary Isaiah: Spirit of Courage, Gift of Tears. “Just as despair is the ignoble stock-in-trade of the world’s systems,” Berrigan writes, “hope is the noble stock-in-trade of the prophet.” Isaiah’s exhortations are “skillfully laved in tenderness,” he writes. Isaiah sees what we see from the precipice, then holds out a hand to draw us back from it.
To draw back requires turning around. Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes that believing people to be capable of repentance “saved the prophets from despair. ... History is not a blind alley, and guilt is not an abyss. There is always a way that leads out of guilt: repentance, or turning to God.” Isaiah and the prophetic tradition remind us: Even though we’ve been here before — between disaster and consequences to come — God has been here, too.
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