Standing with the Accused

THE LORD GOD HAS GIVEN ME the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word those that are weary. Morning by morning God wakens, God wakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.

The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I turned not backward.

I have my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting.

For the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been confounded; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; God who vindicates me is near.

Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together. Who is my adversary? Let them come near to me.

Behold, the Lord God helps me; who will declare me guilty? Behold, all of them will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up.
(Isaiah 50:4-9)

THE TEACHABILITY of the servant fits her for vocation (verses 4-6). She is disciple, listener, attentive to the voice of Another. And in that act and attitude, she is apt for being the disciple of truth and salvation for others.

The connection is of the essence. The beat goes on.

Pain enters the scene, along with persecution and setback. No smooth sailing for the servant of truth; the message is troublesome to worldly goings-on.

Things as they are, politics as they are, war, war preparation, maltreatment of the innocent--these have hardened into a dogma incised on tablets of stone. The conduct of authority, rather than a highly scrutinized, accountable arrangement, justly subject to recall, operates on its own.

The message stirs (apparently) calm waters. The waters in fact stink with pollution. Someone named Isaiah has a keen nose; therefore trouble.

The troublesome character of God's Word inevitably revolves around matters of justice. Still it remains remarkable that in the view of many, there is no troublesome matter in scripture; the Word of God is purely apolitical.

God, thus presented, is acceptable to all and sundry; most of all, one thinks, to the unjust. The Latin oligarchies, we are told (along with many of northern climes), are quite gone on God.

But when God (or God's servant) touches this nerve named the God of justice, uncovers the cover, reveals the suppurating injustice that bleeds away behind the God-talk, the God-worship, the God-prayer, the blessing from the corrupt sanctuary--then trouble!

EARS THAT HEARKEN to the word, a disciple's ear; also a disciple's word for the sake of the weary (verse 4).

One has the image of a clear channel, the channel of ear and throat, into which the Word of God flows unimpeded. Into the soul, then outward to the world.

The Word is not my own; and it has become my own, for the sake of those who are wordless. Or for the sake of those defeated and deafened by the lying, raucous word of the world.

What a refreshment, the Word of truth! And how immediate and devastating the consequence!

The Word no sooner spoken--hatred mounts, and persecution. It is nothing if not realistic, this Word of God concerning the fate of the Word of God. More, concerning the fate of the servant of the Word, whose crime is simply that he stands by his Word.

The Word: God is not neutral, unaffected, self-distanced. God is justice. God has chosen the poor, the anawim. And conversely, God denounces and renounces the purveyors of injustice, whose possessions are a curse, whose power is lethal.

The Word of God is wounding; it provokes.

There is small consolation here; a fist strikes the mouth of the prophet. The Word no sooner spoken than--trouble.

We marvel that no intermediate steps are indicated. Are there no second thoughts on the part of those who oppose the prophet? Is the Word of God so inflammatory that persecution is immediate, inevitable? Is there no pause, no mulling or weighing of the Word? No disposition for the truth?

It is as though "the world" has made its decision beforehand. According to the oracle, the powers never once pause to consider whether this Word may not be to its advantage--worth hearing, reflecting on, debating, questioning.

Perhaps in fact, now and again, something of this occurs. But Isaiah is not interested in these steps toward accommodation, toward a possible, even probable, acceptance. The word that befits, the world that accepts.

He foreshortens things terribly. The Word of God spoken. Then persecution of the speaker of the Word.

Objections occur. Is this not a kind of parti pris, an obsession with failure? Or at the least an unwarrantedly pessimistic view of grace and its persuasive powers? Must the Word of God beat and beat at an intransigent wall, and be refused all access? And for its part, is the world condemned forever to be stuck with no exit to the truth?

Maybe we are too abstract speaking of the world, when Isaiah is concrete and specific, offering instances.

Maybe we should speak rather of those who wield authority in a certain way. Those in whose vested interest it is that political and social realities not budge. And who beyond doubt have the law in their favor, and wield it fervently.

Examples occur. It is quite clear that in cases involving the Plowshares nuclear resisters, judges decide cases before any evidence is heard. Indeed, the relevant evidence is consistently thrown out of court, decreed irrelevant. Juries are rarely allowed to hear moral or international law arguments. In effect, the judge sits with, and sides with, the prosecution.

Nothing, no one, no call to conscience, no summoning of experts has been able to break through this adamantine wall. The truth strikes, but it falls to ground. There remains only the legal charade: the charge to the jury, the inevitable guilty verdict, the punishment. We are in the dock, and then the prison.

We are in fact in the dock with Isaiah, condemned without a hearing.

IN ISAIAH'S TERSE PHRASES, experience is thus disturbingly syncopated. But nonetheless true for being all the more dramatically put.

Isaiah indicates a seeming impasse, the source of the deepest sorrow to the servant of truth. He is sent to all, those of the household, those of the world; and he is rejected. Not by all, certainly, but by those who, taking a stand within the law or under cover of law, are free to stifle the Word. Free, moreover, to degrade and humiliate the servant, who is now a defendant fighting for survival.

There is a strong implication as to responsibility for this charade. In the trial endured by Christ, the hint is no more; the point is hideously explicit. It is the guardians of the law who contemptuously seize upon the law and bend it to their advantage. Thus the powers of this world are revealed as sworn enemies of the truth--and of the truth-tellers.

Let the servant take warning. A tribute, albeit a terrible one, is paid here.

It is the powerful of this world who sense the presence of the truth--its content, its judgment, its explosive power. They have a kind of sixth sense of their adversaries. So they move against them.

For the word of truth cannot be borne. It offers something more damaging and dangerous than an intellectual critique of systems.

It summons the systems to judgment, declares them illegitimate. It condemns their artificers, even while it opens the prison doors; releases their bondsmen and women, their market slaves and stoop workers, their migrants and illegal aliens.

Does this word of truth release also the high and mighty? Let us say it offers them, too, chained as they are to their thrones and high places, a prospect, an out. Freedom.

The word of truth insists that another game must be undertaken if humans are to recover their humanity. A game other than winners and losers, rich and poor, powerful and powerless. The game of Trinity, of community.

Thus the Word of God indicts the indicters. This is the meaning of the "release of prisoners." The Word summons non-persons, those condemned and those who condemn, to a place in the sun, a lost or spurned dignity. And it calls an assize, a people's court, puts the persecutors and judges in the dock for crimes against humanity.

Thus the toppling of systems which Mary celebrates, like a gentle indomitable Fury, in the gospel of Luke.

PILATE IS NOT THE image in verse 6--shrugging, washing hands, posing idle questions. Caiaphas is closer. Or the mob. Or in another time, a Mississippi sheriff or judge. Those for whom the words of the servant, even his presence, what he "stands for," appear as an affront, a stigma against decency and order.

We regard these servants--Isaiah or Christ or Martin Luther King Jr.--where they stand. Hands bound, answering nothing to the charge. Such a reproof offered, even in silence, even in custody; only the removal of the servant from public gaze, from the streets, from utterance, even from the earth itself can bring a peace of sorts. Law and order! Take him away!

The servant has become the resister. And the resistance is severely tested: physically, psychically. Beaten, spat upon, degraded. Stephen Biko, so many thousands of others; the disappeared, the tortured of every time and place. More especially, of our own.

For these the legal process has broken down. More to the point, it was never really applied.

Carnivorous, violent as the system is (the system called justice), it could never be made to function well, even according to its own debased rules (dog eat dog, better in packs than one on one), when it was brought to bear on the conscientious.

In our lifetime. Those in charge of the system knew that against such it could not work.

They must seek a quicker, more efficient way.

They reached for truncheon and gun. What went on in the back rooms of police stations, in interrogation centers, is so horrid as to be unmentionable in court, in such courts.

But Isaiah brings it up, in detail, here and in the fourth song. So do the evangelists, recounting the trial of another prisoner of conscience. This is the unmasking of the powers of which Martin Luther King Jr. spoke.

VERSES 6 AND 7 ARE closely joined. Indeed, the nonviolence, the ability of the accused to stand and withstand, is described as a form of the Lord's presence. And rightly. Not to answer in kind, to retain peace of spirit in the midst of bloody provocation--these summon to one's side the power of the Spirit of God.

Verse 7 offers the logic, explicitly. "This is why ... this is why. ..." We will never know (and yet we do know) the light that was struck, at the death of our martyrs--Biko, Romero, King. We know enough. The consistency, the fervor with which they lived and labored--this is hint enough of the light.

"My face set like a stone (flint) ... I shall not be confounded (ashamed)." Face is the image of soul; in this case, of a steadfast soul.

No confounding, no confusion of spirit.

One speaks such words, ponders them at times, not as though one were living by them. (Who could claim that?) Rather to help them come true, against all odds.

The words are hardly a native tongue. One invokes them, a kind of chant, a hymn in the fiery furnace. And through the words one implores the strength of that "cloud of witnesses" who first uttered them, lived and died by them.

It is inspiriting to recall how freighted such words are, with history and greatness. The words of martyrs.

We are not to conjure up images of supermen and women ("my face of flint"), but of those who simply, and under the harshest duress, kept the faith.

VERSE 8: A TRIAL SCENE. God sits as judge, or perhaps as jury. In any case, God will vindicate the accused.

Acquittal. Can it be true? In the final analysis, Isaiah (and we) must seek justice only from God. This was the understanding of the early church.

Therefore the trial scene is outside time, in the nature of a last judgment. In this world such a scene can take place only in the heart of the accused, who knows beyond doubt that he is innocent, and that he will be vindicated (but not here, not now).

In this world, the accused will be found guilty. That is the ironbound law. But the God in whom the servant trusts stands with him not only as accused, but as one already convicted, as one criminalized. (God has gone further even; God stands with the criminal Christ.)

The faith of Isaiah penetrates the sordid temporal court, and declares an outcome which can only be named audacious. According to his unshakable faith, a startling reversal of the predictable outcome of legal "process" occurs.

The drama gets under way. The outcome, strange to say, is announced beforehand. What a literal, bold faith!

Then a dare is issued. Let the accuser (prosecutor) stand forth. Let him face me. Let us together weigh the evidence, weigh our chances, his and mine. (In Revelation, the prosecutor is identified as Satan, the "one who accuses the just, night and day.")

Isaiah is a free spirit; no captivity to the law. In him shines the freedom of love.

Is this a clue to the demonic nature of the Accuser--enslavement to the law? Enslavement whose proper setting is not a courtroom at all, but hell. (Or are the two roughly the same?)

"WITH GOD STANDING by me, who will condemn me? Whoever [attempts it] will fall away to rags, like a garment. The moths will consume them" (verse 9).

Commonly, prosecutors present themselves as spiffy types; judges are robed with dignity and authority. Hizzoner enters! All stand!

All this pretension, this pinch-penny grandeur must (according to Isaiah) be peeled away, decontaminated, demythologized, in order that the truth may appear--the truth which ritual and decor serve to banish.

Then the truth appears through another door. The accused.

Then and now, it is the one in the dock whose gaze sees through it all. His contemned estate grants him a wonderful concentration of mind, a kind of third eye.

The accusers are described with a certain contempt; the image is one of death, diminishment. Behold, their garments spoke for them--greatness, import, ego, sovereignty, the last word. Deterrence. Life and death power.

But what of human substance, compassion, wisdom, truthfulness? Not much. More exactly, nothing.

It is as though the garments were empty, as though they clothed hollow disembodied ghosts. Then the robes fell away to rags and the moths flocked to the feast.

The truth, at last. The garments were a sign, signifying nothing. They were the cerements of corpses; they were wired for sound. Zombies spoke through them; the dead spoke, only of death.

CHRISTIANS ARE COMMONLY instructed from their youth to be great respecters of the law. Which dictum would seem to separate us from Isaiah (among other great spirits) rather startlingly.

To speak of Christian beginnings, early on, a far different attitude marked our ancestors in the faith. First came the Pauline assault on the law as savior. Later generations, for various complicated reasons, fled once more to the shelter of law, debatedly a worse.

For centuries, Christians have paid large tribute of idolatry to the law of the land. To the law of this or that nation-state (it mattered little which one, how virtuous or criminal)--once more reinstated as savior.

By and large, Christians consider themselves justified by keeping the law. Thus a monstrous other savior, the savior of property, investment, civil order, national security, the savior of armies "lurches toward Bethlehem to be born."

The image endures; so does the reality. The beast is perennially born anew, seizing on ever-new and persuasive forms, now brutal, now subtle, always assured of bed, board, and welcome. He thrives, he battens, he justifies, condemns; he makes a wreckage of landscape and heart.

"The end of the world," Thomas Merton wrote, "will be legal." Until we understand that, we have underestimated the pernicious force of the law, inducted by the nuclear powers into the business of justifying "final omnicrime."

A sanction is attached to the Word of God in verse 10. The symbol of the Word is fire; another kind of fire than yours, you who walk in darkness.

You may kindle your firebrands, form a circle of light struck by your own hands. But beware, such fires consume those who light them.

Whereas obedience, trust, reliance on the God of the servant--these are a light which neither destroys the seeker nor is extinguished in the rude winds of the world.

Daniel Berrigan, priest, poet, peace activist, and author of To Dwell in Peace (Harper & Row, 1987), was a Sojourners contributing editor. An anthology of Berrigan's writings, Daniel Berrigan: Poetry, Drama, Prose, was published by Orbis Books.