As I prepped my sermon this last week, I encountered a dark harmony in scripture that hadn't ever surfaced for me before. This happens with surprising frequency, 'cause even though I have preached over a thousand sermons in my twenty plus years in ministry, my encounter with the Word is new every week.
It's a sacred book of books that goes back over two millennia in written form. It stretches back at least another thousand years (or more) if we consider the now-lost manuscripts upon which it is based, and the oral traditions go back further still. Put that into encounter with this moment, and you have nearly endless opportunities for interpretive newness. The Word lives and breathes.
The connection that popped this week was rooted in the book of Isaiah, in the story of Isaiah's call. Isaiah's prophetic witness was to the wealthy and the powerful of his people, back in a time when the rich were fat and self-satisfied. They were completely convinced that their power was a marker of God's blessing. Isaiah's message to them for the first thirty nine chapters of his prophetic book is relentlessly harsh, as he again and again calls them to account for oppressing the poor and failing to do justice. The story of how he came to be a prophet is recounted in chapter 6, and it contains a peculiar curse.
Tell the people, God says, that they will not see, hear, comprehend, or understand. Nothing you say will change their minds, and they will be destroyed. So God's message, through Isaiah the prophet, is that the people have lost their ability to choose justice and grace. There's no way out of the trap they've set for themselves, and things 'bout to get real.
I've read this call passage many times before, but this last week for the first time, I realized it reminded me of another difficult passage: the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. In the Exodus story, Pharaoh refuses to yield to Moses' call to set his people free, even in the face of rising diseases and tempests and fires. Why wouldn't he relent? His heart, we hear in Torah, has been hardened by God. He can't course correct. He can't repent. He is no longer free to choose to escape his fate, as the wrath of God deepens against him.
Given the necessity of repentance for the Gospel, this story seems to set a boundary around grace that has always troubled my pastoral heart. Surely, surely there is not a point when our selfish and self-destructive choices cannot be undone, when we can't be forgiven, when the fires of God's anger cannot be stopped by God's love.
Yet there are such times. We can, from our choosing, reach a point when we are inured to mercy, when we despise the love of neighbor, when we attack both repentance and forgiveness as an affront to our pride and power. That, as the Master taught it, is an offense against the working of the Spirit, and it is the one sin that cannot be forgiven. God will allow us to harden our hearts, to close our ears, to shut our eyes, and to be destroyed. Because we are always free to choose to believe our own lies, to choose selfishly, to choose dominance and Mammon over grace and justice.
It's the terrible price of our liberty.
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