Isaiah 5:1-7 "Looking for Justice" Scott Hoezee

It is a telling indicator of where our society is at these days to note that over the course of the last year-and-a-half (which encompasses, therefore, an entire presidential election) there have been two significant occasions when the word "justice" has been spoken frequently by people throughout this country. First we heard the word "justice" over and over in connection with the election debacle in Florida. Second and more recently we heard a lot about "justice" in connection with Timothy McVeigh's execution. Different though those two events are, what both essentially come down to are questions of law, of crime and punishment, of the minutiae surrounding Federal election stipulations.

But although these aspects of "justice" have some overlap with biblical ideas on the subject, the fact that we now mostly reserve this term for criminals getting punished or for the intricacies of complex verdicts shows that we have lost a good deal of what "justice" means in Scripture. After all, isn't it ironic that in and through all of the campaign advertisements, stump speeches, and presidential debates a year ago we heard very little from the candidates about justice. We got through the entire campaign without seeing ads focused on justice issues. Only when the courts had to get involved to sort out the Florida quagmire did the word "justice" at long last come to be associated with the election!

Isaiah 5 is finally a passage about justice in ancient Israel. More specifically, it is about the lack of justice in Israel--a deficit which caused God great pain. In fact, as my seminary classmate Reggie Smith once said, Isaiah 5 is a little like "God singing the Blues." If you are familiar with the jazz genre of the Blues, then you know that most such songs are about unrequited love or love gone bad. Billie Holiday was probably the greatest Blues singer as she crooned lyrics like, "Without your love I'm like a song without words, a nest without birds, a plane without wings, a violin without strings, without your love." "Lady sings the blues, she's got 'em bad, she feels so sad." "You've changed, that sparkle in your eyes is gone, your smile is just an aching yawn. You've changed, you're bored with me in every way. You've changed. You've forgotten the words 'I love you' and each memory that we share. It's all over now. You've changed." That's the Blues!

Isaiah 5 is God singing the Blues. As commentators note, the chapter begins with what looks like some light-hearted romantic ballad. A kind of troubadour opens this chapter by saying, "Listen up! I'm going to sing you a ballad about my beloved one--a song about the vineyard of our love!" It looks like a love song but quickly changes into a Bluesy lament. The singer worked hard to create the right conditions for his love-vineyard, for what is later called "a garden of delight." He did everything right. He planted expensive vines, vines of cabernet, zinfandel, merlot, and chardonnay grapes. So far as he knew, everything was on track. Grapes grew and looked like the genuine article. Vines seemed to flourish. Finally the harvest came, but the only grapes he could find were sour, stinky, and worthless.

"What else could I have done," the man cries out in despair. "What more could I have provided? There's nothing for the entire project but to start over." So in a kind of fury fueled by heartbreak the vintner declares the destruction of all he had labored so hard to build. And just in case anyone has missed the point of this chapter's first 6 verses, the voice of the prophet bursts onto the scene in verse 7 to make painfully clear who the vineyard is: it's Israel. And she's done for.

But that is not all which verse 7 clarifies. Through the clever use of a verbal word play or pun Isaiah makes clear why it was that in the end Yahweh regarded the Israelites as a bunch of stinkers. In verse 7 Isaiah said that the good, juicy grapes Yahweh wanted were justice and righteousness. Instead what God discovered was the exact opposite. Instead of justice he found bloodshed, instead of righteousness he found the cries of the oppressed.

The word-play here stems from the fact that in Hebrew the difference between "justice" and "bloodshed" and between the "righteousness" and "cries" is just one letter. These words are so similar to each other that you have to read carefully and look closely to see the difference. God looked for mishpat (justice) but discovered instead mishpah (bloodshed); he looked for zedekah (righteousness) but found instead azekah (cries). Again, this is a kind of pun where the change of just one letter creates a very different meaning.

In English it might be like the difference between the words "whither," meaning "which way are you going," and "wither," which means to wilt and dry up. They sound and very nearly look the same but their meanings are exceedingly different. Puns, of course, are often used to humorous effect, as when Winston Churchill, commenting on what he regarded as the roaringly boring speeches of diplomat John Foster Dulles, once said that his speeches were "dull, duller, dulles."

But there's nothing funny about the pun in verse 7, so why did Isaiah use it? Perhaps to convey that when it comes to justice and righteousness, close is not good enough. It didn't matter whether the grapes on Israel's vine looked from a distance like the kind of grapes God desired. It was the closer inspection that counted.

Israel had a form of justice, all right, but it was justice for the few, the wealthy, the lucky "winners" of society. Meanwhile, most of what the upper crust had was ill-gotten gain: it was built upon the shed blood of the poor. Some of the people looked very righteous, very pious--they went to the Temple, observed the Sabbath, prayed now and again. Yet their ears were deaf to the cries of distress which God's ears picked out very easily. Instead of being the locus of justice, the Temple became a shelter for the elite whose walls were used to keep them from hearing the cries of the needy.

Throughout the Old Testament it is clear that justice involved far more than criminals like Timothy McVeigh getting punished. Crimes carried punishments in ancient Israel, of course, but that negative aspect of justice was not nearly as vital as the positive aspect. Justice was mostly a way to prevent crimes from happening, and one of the biggest crimes that needed to be avoided was a trampling upon that trio grouping which comes up again and again in the Old Testament like a refrain: the widow, the orphan, and the alien. Women who had lost their husbands, children who had lost their parents, and the "stranger who is within your gates" were all people who potentially could have fallen through the cracks.

These groups represented the "underdogs" of society--the marginalized who could so easily be exploited. "Justice" in the Old Testament (and the Old Testament has 86% of all the Bible's references to "justice") was more about caring for the needy than punishing the wicked. Today we tend to restrict justice to matters related to the legal system. "Judges" today are people in black robes who get involved only after laws are broken. But the biblical "judges" (from the book of the same name) were not people who doled out verdicts from a bench but were champions of justice who went out and pursued the righteous things of God.

But the day finally came in Israel when there were no such champions. The Jubilee year was ignored. Farmers greedily picked up every last speck of grain from their fields, leaving nothing behind for the poor to glean. People who fell into debt did not see their debts cancelled or their mortgaged property returned eventually, as God's law demanded. Precisely what God did not want to see in Israel happened anyway: there developed a permanent underclass of widows, orphans, and foreign immigrants. The people who allowed all of that to happen were the real stinkers in Israel who break God's heart in Isaiah 5.

A divine heartbreak is, of course, no small matter. Eventually Israel did suffer grievously in history, being conquered in the northern kingdom by the Assyrians and later in the southern kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians--a defeat from which the nation of Israel never really recovered (unless you count the founding of modern Israel roughly 2,500 years later!).

Still, that was then. That is history. So what does Isaiah 5 have to teach us now? After all, we are not living in ancient Israel or any kind of divinely sanctioned theocratic nation. Nowhere does the New Testament tell followers of Christ to form their own nation, adopting the laws of ancient Israel lock, stock, and barrel. As some of you know, there is a group which recommends just that. They are called "Theonomists" or "Reconstructionists" who believe that if America is truly to be God's country, then Old Testament-like laws need to be adopted here, including the death penalty for gays, adulterers, and rebellious children.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but our Reformed tradition wants nothing to do with that kind of graceless, naive thinking. But does that mean that for Christians like us in the church today 86% of the Bible's talk about public justice is just an historical footnote? Clearly that kind of bracketing of the Old Testament is also not a part of our Christian and Reformed tradition. So how are we to appropriate God's love of justice and righteousness in ways that will head off God's needing to sing the Blues over also our lives?

The full answer to that question is more than I can provide in the balance of this sermon (it may be more than I could provide ever, to be candid about it!). Nevertheless, let me attempt to break down the broad outlines of Old Testament justice and then suggest some ways by which all of this should properly influence us even yet today.

In a simple, admittedly watered down, way God's vision for justice in Israel tied in with two broad areas: economics and what we today might call "human rights." Both areas have a similar bottom line concern, however: care for the underprivileged. Economically the Israelites were to see themselves not as owners of their wealth and property but stewards of it in that the land and all its fruits finally belonged to God alone. There was no such thing as "private finances" or "personal property" in any absolute sense. Israel was to be a community of sharing, of giving back to God the top (and best) 10% of everything, and of being a little sloppy if that's what it took to always make sure there was something left over for the poor to pick up after a field had been harvested or a banquet celebrated.

A most dramatic expression of this was the Year of Jubilee every fifty years. Jubilee was a wiping clean of the fiscal slate. Debts were cancelled, mortgaged and forfeited property reverted back to its original owners or their heirs. When Jubilee came around, no one could look at their property or possessions and then say, "But it's mine! Why should I give it back!?" Jubilee was a grand way for God to say, "No, it's all mine and I can and will tell you what to do with it for the larger justice of society!"

Mostly God's economic advice tied in with that second broad area of Israelite justice, which is human rights, care for the disenfranchised and vulnerable. Considering that Israel was a God-centered theocracy where there was very little, if any, difference between politics and religion, it ought to be quite surprising to see how much space God's law devotes to being welcoming of foreign immigrants, most of whom were not followers of Yahweh. But God wanted people to adopt something of the divine heart in being able to cast a compassionate eye on underdogs. Frequently this care for strangers was grounded in the memory of Egyptian slavery. The Israelites knew firsthand what it can be like to be strangers in a strange land. Worse, they knew what it was like to be mistreated by their hosts. They were not to turn around and do unto others as the Egyptians had done unto them!

Perhaps another reason God emphasized this is precisely because God is well aware of a common human tendency: the oppressed often respond to their oppression by becoming oppressors themselves. The kid who on the playground gets shoved around all day by the school bully goes home and dominates his little brother as an outlet for his frustration. The last ethnic group allowed into the country club sometimes becomes very vocal about keeping the next group out (after all, what's the sense of being in some elite club if there is not someone who is out?!). More recently the Jews were horribly treated and persecuted by the Nazis, but ever since World War II it would be a stretch to call the modern-day Israelis "gracious hosts" over against the Palestinians. There has even been some evidence of resentment among African-Americans of other ethnic minorities in this country who were not part of the Civil Rights movement but who are now benefitting from the gains of what Dr. King and others achieved.

Justice in the Old Testament aims to head off that kind of stratifying oppression. Justice is the key avenue leading to shalom. And shalom is God's dearest wish and most lilting vision for this creation. Shalom is the webbing together of all people and all creatures in relationships which are not competitive, not a matter of insiders and outsiders, winners and losers, the haves and the have-nots. Shalom is everyone's contributing something to the flourishing of everyone else.

Again, however, the question of how to apply this outside of a well-defined nation like ancient Israel is a valid query. Then again, seeing some of what this may imply for our lives should not be that difficult. A few weeks ago we thought about that last "I Am"saying from John's gospel where Jesus said, "I am the true vine, you are the branches." In that sermon I did not do much with that adjective "true." Why didn't Jesus simply say "I am the vine"? Why did he nuance it as the "true vine"? Commentators think it was because Jesus was harking back to Old Testament passages like Isaiah 5. Israel should have been God's true and genuine vineyard, but she wasn't. Only stinky grapes got produced off Israel's vines in the long run. So God chucked it and ultimately started over with Jesus, the true vine of God. Here at last was the kind of fruit God had wanted all along.

But we are the branches of that vine. If grapes grow, they grow in our lives. So although our situation is vastly different from ancient Israel, many of the same ideas about justice then need to be of concern for us now. In our country, however, that does not always happen. For years there was a professor in Calvin's Religion and Theology Department who offered any student in his class $20 if anyone could find a TV evangelist preaching on one of the Minor Prophets and on their incessant theme of social justice. He's been retired for some years now, but when I ran into him in Florida recently, he confirmed that he never had to part with a $20 bill as a result of that wager!

Next month we will think at some length about stewardship so I won't say much more now. But the idea that what we have is first and last God's (such that he can tell us what to do with our money and talents and possessions) is something we need to be reminded of frequently. The idea that God has a special place in his heart for the downtrodden is likewise something that needs to be reflected in our ministries and in the priorities we set.

When the vulnerable are ignored, when resources are squandered or selfishly hoarded, when justice gets replaced by bloodshed and the cause of God's righteousness by the cries of society's distressed, it gives God the Blues. For those of us who are branches growing on the true vine of Christ Jesus the Lord, we need to help God and all people sing a better, more uplifting song--perhaps something like "Let all things now living a song of thanksgiving to God the Creator triumphantly raise!" That is the song toward which we are headed in Christ. Let's do what we can to help everyone sing it already now! Amen.