Prophet Isaiah – a Christian “avant la lettre”

Moses and Elijah appearing beside Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration represent the Law and the Prophets, a makeshift way of referring to the books of the Old Testament. For the Jewish people, Moses, the legislator from Mount Sinai, symbolizes the Law, to whom 5 books of the Pentateuch are attributed. Similarly, Elijah, who decimated the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, symbolizes the prophets since the Hebrews regarded him as the greatest of all prophets. So great was Elijah that he did not experience death like the rest of the mortals but while alive was taken up into heaven and is expected to return as the precursor of the Messiah to announce his coming.

Different from the Jewish perspective, the Christian point of view, which understands the Old Testament as a preparation of the New, regards Isaiah as the greatest of all prophets. Unlike Elijah who was tendentiously nationalistic and somewhat xenophobic, Isaiah is universal and is accepting of all peoples and races. Every year during Advent, he delights us with his idyllic vision of an open and inclusive society where peace and harmony reign among all peoples despite their differences:

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. (Isaiah 11:6) In this renewed world where the swords are changed into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (Isaiah 2:4) Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel but of the world because it is there that the Lord of the Universe will prepare for the peoples a feast of rich food and of well-matured wines. (Isaiah 25:6)

In fact, Christ in his speech to inaugurate his public life quotes this very same prophet to say that the Word of God prophesied through his mouth as a promise is fulfilled today in Jesus himself, the Incarnate Word. The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed … (Isaiah 61:1-2, Luke 4:16-22).

It is Isaiah who 300 years before Christ came speaks to us of the circumstances of the birth of Jesus, showing us in his vision the mystery of the incarnation of God; a virgin shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14), which means God-with-us.

It is also Isaiah who anticipates for us the Passion of the Lord in his song of the Servant of Yahweh and gives us the meaning of the atonement of the passion and death of the Lord: Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases… He was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities… He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter… (Isaiah 53:4-7)

Isaiah does in the Old Testament what the author of the Letter to the Hebrews does in the New. As such, the author of the Letter shows that the New Testament, the New Covenant, is not radically different nor opposed to the Old, but rather it is its natural extension and above all, it is the realization of the promises written there. In this way, Isaiah with his universalism personifies and advocates, already in the Old Testament, a novel idea -- that the Kingdom of God which Christ came to bring is for everyone, that is, salvation is for all and not just for Israel. Above all, he foretold already in his time, in an ultra-nationalistic milieu which has always characterized Israel as the chosen people, that salvation is for all without the distinction of nation, people or language.

These two characters are like a pivot that joins the two testaments. Isaiah, on one hand, extends from the Old Testament to the New connecting the testaments from back to the front and on the other hand, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, connects them from the front to the back, viewing the Old as the pre-history of the New.

Like a tree that in order to grow upwards by stretching out its branches, needs to simultaneously grow downwards by deepening its roots into the ground, so the author of the Letter from the New Testament goes into the Old Testament to find there the promises that he saw accomplished in the New, that is, the “unfinished business” that are now consummated, the seed that was sown which now has given fruit, and how the whole history of salvation is directed to the coming of Christ.

Like an old man who plants a tree from which he will not live long enough to taste of its fruit, so is the Prophet Isaiah’s utopian dream of a world to come in which there is no “chosen people” because God the Creator of all is also the Father of all. The utopian vision of a world where we see a common roof, a town that all call home, a table as round as the world where wolves and lambs partake of the same meal, a world that has no use for weapons, where tools of destruction are transformed into tools of construction.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews is the ambassador or the envoy of the New Testament in the Old since he tries to conceptualize and explain the New using the very same theological concepts of the Old. In going back and finding the roots of the New in the Old he represents the New in the Old.

Similarly, Prophet Isaiah is also the ambassador or the envoy of the New in the Old as he, despite living in the time of the Old Testament, surprisingly upholds views that are more in tune with the New Testament. In projecting himself into the future, out of a xenophobic setting, Isaiah is a true representative of the New Testament’s universality of salvation in the Old Testament. Therefore, we can call Isaiah a Christian “avant la letter”, and the author of the Letter a Jew converted to Christianity.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC