Reread this week’s lectionary text: Isaiah 40:21-31. Tomorrow we will read Psalm 147. Enjoy a devotion on both texts from Paul Keim, professor of Bible and religion at Goshen College, both today and tomorrow (https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2003-01/no-comparison.)
Isaiah faced a challenge. How was he to awaken an exiled community from the lethargy of despair? The people’s confidence had been shattered. Their entire worldview was drained of its mimetic properties. Former glories lay in ruins. Now the people lived in the land of the dreaded enemy, reciting litanies of lamentation while ghouls goaded them with “Sing us some of those songs of Zion, miserable losers! Celebrate the memory of what no longer exists.” Psalm 137 records the agony of exile and culminates in a cathartic curse.
But in the taunt lurks a solution, a strategy used by untold generations of the conquered: Take the lemon of the oppressor and make lemonade. Using a series of rhetorical questions, the prophet pushes aside the numbness that is our common defense against pain. Who created this? He asks. Who sustains that? Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard? Why do you keep on chanting that your way is hidden from Yahweh, that your plight is disregarded by God? Don’t you know? (“Of course you know!”) Haven’t you heard? (“Of course you have!”)
Remember the temple psalms of praise, Isaiah urges. You’ve heard of God’s might because you’ve sung about it! The descriptions of God’s mighty acts of creation in the oracle are retrieved from hymns of praise, the ones you’re remembering now. Yes, the accompanying rituals are gone, but the power of the worshiping community is awakened in the oracle of comfort. Yahweh (not Marduk) created all this. God (not the king of Babylon) is in control.
One of the prominent themes of these hymns is the incomparability of God, a cultural trope that signifies the highest form of praise. To whom can you compare God? Who is God’s equal? There is no other like the One. This is a common biblical assertion, given expression in the common names Mi-ka-’el and Mi-ka-ya(hu) and Micah “Who is like God/Yahweh?” It is found among the oldest poetry in the Bible, “Who is like you, O Yahweh, among the gods? Who is like you, awesome in splendor?”
Incomparability is also related to ineffability. We know things only insofar as we can describe their likeness. So the use of this convention also expresses the ultimate mystery of God, and acknowledges that our language and symbols can never adequately grasp the being and will of God. I was taught that pious believers do not pronounce the name of God, not because that name is too holy, but because we believers must avoid assuming that it is possible to grasp God, to fully understand God or to control God.
Incomparability is also related, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to the monotheistic claim that there are no other gods. There are no equals or even standards of measure that might be mustered to quantify God’s greatness. Not the idols—even the skillfully made ones. Not the gods—even the beneficent ones. And certainly not the princes and rulers who like to play God—not even the powerful ones.
Having affirmed this, however, it is just as evident that the Bible is full of such implicit comparisons. While the effects of God’s acts are described by explicit comparisons, or similes, God is always described metaphorically. God is a rock, a fortress, a redeemer/avenger of blood, a shepherd, a doting mother, a bridegroom, a warrior, a consuming fire, a sound of sheer silence. A plethora of penultimate metaphors constitute the divine epithets of the Bible’s prophetic and hymnic literature.
In this oracle of comfort the prophet uses the hymnic traditions of the pre-exilic temple to introduce the theme of Yahweh’s sovereignty over nature and history. It contains a subtle polemic against the astral deities whose worship was at the heart of Babylonian religion. The assertion of God’s sovereignty over the nations is intended to rouse the people from their stupor of lamentation and reestablish their faith.
Pray: Mighty God, help us call to mind your incomparability when our confidence is shattered and restore us to a proper trust in You. Amen.