Jerusalem Has Stumbled

Spoken Through the Prophets-3
Isaiah reference / Chapter 2-3
Format / Japanese renga

In speech and in deeds
Jerusalem has stumbled
Judah has fallen
  You brought on evil yourselves
  forgot God who gave you birth

Sweet shall be bitter
because you deny justice
and think yourselves wise
  The invaders have advanced
  See how swiftly they come now

None of them tired
weapons already unsheathed 
their arrows sharpened
  Like fierce young lions they roar
  Soon now it will come to pass

Enter the caverns –
pride of everyone humbled
hidden in the dust
  Lose your idols of silver
  Hide or flee from the terror

Flee from the glory
Elohim comes with terror
Food reserves are gone
  And water will be gone too
  Try to run from your duties

After Judah falls
the mountains will be home for God
The tribes will gather
  The nations shall come to us
  to mountains of Elohim

Find your shelter there
and a flaming fire by night
shade by day from heat
  And warmth by night from the chill
  a mountain sanctuary

Reflections and Connexions

I wonder what the experience of play, friendship, and learning was for Isaiah, son of Amoz, as he grew up in his hometown of Jerusalem. It must have been difficult for Isaiah to write that Jerusalem had stumbled. He might have had to lose friends for the sake of his own integrity as a prophet. He was from a royal family and was an advisor to the king. What he had known as good he exchanged for a great unknown. Moving beyond our youthful understandings and experience is not easy for anyone because the moving beyond is moving into a world of uncertainty.

Early in his prophetic career Isaiah realizes that his community has lost both the horizontal relationships with each other and the vertical experience of God. In New Testament vocabulary, the goal of justice is to form a people that love God and love their neighbor – all their neighbors. Throughout his life Isaiah probably has one foot in the establishment world in which he grew up and one in the world of being its critic. He cared about his country right up to the exile to Babylon. He wrote much about the political and cultural dynamics of the kingdom of Judah. He hoped that the people could return to God and to justice. The mountains in the poem are not just geography but the place of the covenant with God in the myth of the Hebrew people. If you want to think of covenant in anthropological or evolutionary terms, it is also the loving and trusting gaze that we first shared with our mothers and that can be shared with other humans.

In the Book of Isaiah, especially chapters 1-39, Isaiah, son of Amoz, wrote poetry and gave advice to the king about what could be done to overcome the invasion of Assyria or the Philistines or Babylon. (I have not included much from Isaiah’s prophesies concerning other nations in this work. That would require me and you acquiring more background on ancient politics than we might wish to.) But as he wrote Jerusalem Has Stumbled, Isaiah might have hoped that his old friends will find a spot to hide in the hill caves of Judah even though he seems to be saying that God is now on the side of the invaders.

My hope in this Isaiah project is to find the places where Isaiah might have something to say to us now. Where did we stumble? And who is “we?” – those people over there or our generation or our whole country at some point in our history or the many empires in the history of civilization? I have read explanations from the Sword of Constantine, 313 CE, to the last election, and I believe all of them try to speak the truth. The point is to own our own stumbles, to acknowledge where society or culture has fallen and failed. As an Ignatian exercise (use your imagination) I offer below Jerusalem Has Stumbled with only some words changed.

America Has Stumbled

In speech and in deeds
America has stumbled
Our world has fallen
  You brought on evil yourselves
  forgot God who gave you birth

Sweet shall be bitter
because you deny justice
and think yourselves wise
  The invaders have advanced
  See how swiftly they come now

You were warned before
wars and climate change unsheathed 
crisis on crisis
  People just going crazy
  Soon now it will come to pass

Enter the caverns –
pride of everyone humbled
hidden in the dust
  Lose your money and egos
  Hide if you can from terrors

Flee from the glory
Yahweh is bringing terror
Food reserves are gone
  And water will be gone too
  Try to run from your duties

After our world falls
the mountains will be home for God
The tribes will gather
  The nations shall come to form
  a new covenant with God

Get ready to camp
with a flaming fire by night
and some shade by day
  Find fellow humans and God
  in mountain sanctuary