Isaiah 6 and Overloading the Senses

"In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2 Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 And one called to another and said:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.’
4 The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. 5 And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’

6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. 7 The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’ 8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’ 9 And he said, ‘Go and say to this people:
“Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.”
10 Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,
and turn and be healed.’
11 Then I said, ‘How long, O Lord?’ And he said:
‘Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;
12 until the Lord sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
13 Even if a tenth part remains in it,
it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled.’
The holy seed is its stump."

The "Easy" Way to Preach/Teach this Passage

There is a customary, and quite easy, way to preach this passage. Those three points, if you want to develop them, are these: (1) The Holiness of God (1-3); (2) The Call of Isaiah (4-8); (3) The Message of Isaiah (9-13). Under the first you can stress the contrast between the death of a human king and the living quality of God, the eternal king. You could emphasize the dramatic nature of the temple shaking. You could speak of the threefold "Holy" which fills the house. Then, in talking about Isaiah's call you could stress his awareness of sin (Reformed Christians love this one), his solidarity with the people and his response to God when the coals touch and purify his lips. Finally, if you wanted to speak about his message you could emphasize the destruction and, finally, the little word of hope in the last sentence. Indeed, this makes for an adequate and even quite fine sermon or teaching time. In re-reading and studying this passage, however, some other things stayed with me. Here they are.

My Approach--Isaiah and Overloading the Senses

Let's first set the context. A favorite topic of biblical scholarship about a generation ago was what one might call the "prophetic personality" or the "prophetic imagination." Emphasis was on the prophets as lonely individuals, as faithful preachers of the Word of God when all around them rejected them. This approach has faded in more recent days as literary scholars focused increasingly on themes like word-play in the text or the possible communities that may have nurtured the prophet. In other words, there is now less emphasis on the prophet as independent spokesman for God and more on the webs of connection or relationship he might have had with various other groups in the ancient Israelite community. Of course, all this scholarship was quite tentative and speculative but if you had to eliminate speculation from biblical scholarship you would have thousands of unemployed scholars around you. We don't want that to happen.

I never really "bought into" the "prophet and community" approach, interesting as it was. Certainly it correctly emphasized that prophets are not lonely individualists who just "show up" and start preaching. They are connected, like Jeremiah, to priestly guilds (Jer. 1:1) or they are very much a part of the exilic community (like Ezekiel). But this excessive emphasis on their connection to community tended to obscure the theme that I think leaps off the page from the Isaiah passage for today, and that is what I call Isaiah's hypersensuality. Maybe a prophet is so called because he hears, sees and feels things more deeply than other people, and then he reports on these feelings. The purpose of these comments, then, is to re-read Is. 6 with special attention to how Isaiah's emotions were heightened in his temple experience. I will begin with what Isaiah saw , then move to what Isaiah felt and conclude with what Isaiah heard. The points overlap.

What Isaiah Saw

King Uzziah had just died. He was a long-reigning monarch, and the death of such a king presaged possible instability in the kingdom and surrounding areas. For example, in the year that King Ahaz died (Is. 28:14), we have this oracle to a neighboring country (Philistia):

"Do not rejoice, all you Philistines,
that the rod that struck you is broken.." (14:29).

Isaiah repaired to the temple of God in the midst of national emergency. What first strikes us is the language of seeing. In the year that King Uzziah died Isaiah "saw the Lord." The Hebrew text is quite clear. He is worshipping. His eyes are drawn to the screen separating the sanctuary from the Holy of Holies. He sees the smoke and the fire of the altar, and in between the seraphim is the Lord. He sees God. Well, another Scripture has it that no one can see God and live (Ex. 33:20), but Isaiah's words seem to defy this Scripture. Oh, we can quickly diminish the fire of his words by saying, 'Hm, Isaiah saw smoke and fire and in order to make his words vivid said, 'I saw the Lord.'' But let's not quickly back down from the language of Scripture. Isaiah saw the Lord. His senses were alert; his heart was touched by the fire he saw; his imagination was already flying with the wings that only the seraphim had. When Job tells us that he knows that his redeemer lives, he, in a wild flight of poetic imagination says, "And in my flesh I shall see God" (Job 19:26, though scholars differ on the proper translation). If we went around saying today that we see God, we probably would lose our credibility. But there it is. The prophet has a heightened sense of vision.

He also sees the seraphim fly. We know that above the ark of the covenant were the two seraphim, angels from the highest order of these intermediate creatures. Isaiah tells us that each had six wings, with two of which they covered face, with two the "legs," and with two they flew. This notion of two "free" wings to fly stays with Isaiah's imagination, and several verses later he says that one of the cherubim flew to him, touching his lips with the altar's coal (v. 6). He sees the seraph moving. Fixed things are not so fixed in Isaiah's imagination. They move from the place where they are supposed to be and come right to him. Those who sense their call deeply realize that the world is more dynamic, more energized, more filled with the glory of God than other people imagine.

We still have two senses to go. The next essay deals with them.

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