In Isaiah 50:4 the second Isaiah says, of himself: “The Lord God has given Me the tongue of discipleship, to sustain the weary with a word. ...[and] He awakens My ears to listen as a disciple”. God has given second Isaiah two input devices and one output device. As a disciple of first Isaiah, second Isaiah has his ears attuned to the tradition passed on to him from his mentor and he, in turn, passes on the spiritual sustenance of that tradition to those who are in need of its nourishment. This makes him a missionary disciple.
Is second Isaiah’s mission to just pass out photocopies of first Isaiah’s homilies? No, he takes the tradition, passed on to him, and uses it as leaven kneading it into the historical circumstances, of his time, to produce the contemporary insights required to be an effective witness. He takes care to make sure that each of these insights comes packaged with an audit trail leading back into the tradition. As a missionary disciple he deepens the insights of the tradition and broadens its application. In this way the tradition becomes a living and life-giving tradition.
As an example, second Isaiah, starting with what was passed on to him, produces the insights contained in the “Servant Songs”, from which we read passages, at Easter: “But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5.
We can think of tradition like a source of pure water that feeds into an ever-widening river system that spreads and irrigates a dry and thirsty land. As disciples we are ecologists of tradition working to ensure that the waters do not become polluted, or the flow rate diminishes, because the downstream consequences could be disastrous.
In the modern world, the destruction or pollution of tradition has taken on a life of its own. G.K. Chesterton makes the point that, “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead...Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” By arrogantly draining the reservoir of tradition, our resource for gaining insight diminishes along with applicability of our principles. At some point we will just run out of gas and find ourselves “dead in the water” stranded in some dry and thirsty land.
Talking about being “dead in the water”, for the poet Dante, the lowest level of hell was a lake where its inhabitants were paralysed, frozen up to their necks in ice and screaming into the void. With the current assault on tradition, we might find ourselves starting to ask, “Why are we in this hand basket and why is it getting so cold?”
Image credit Missional Volunteer, Flickr
Authors
Adele's Photography
