Many years ago some friends prevailed upon me to go and do one of those massed Messiah sing-a-longs, where you have one rehearsal then put on a concert in the Sydney Town Hall. By the end of it I had lost the will to live. I am a fan of Handel, and a fan of the messiah, but I can’t stand Handel’s Messiah. I don’t know why the Hallelujah chorus is so popular and I can’t stand the setting of today’s reading – for unto us a child is tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly. What’s with all the tiddling? It really gets on my tiddlies.
For some reason Handel’s Messiah has become popular to perform at Christmas, even though it is clearly an Easter work. It is 53 movements long (another reason to hate it with a white hot passion) and 17 of those movements refer to the book of Isaiah. Handel’s Messiah does in musical form what the gospel writers and early church did in written form. It takes Hebrew scriptural texts and explicitly applies them to Jesus. There is no room for doubt in Handel’s tedious work that when one sings ‘Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace’ 116 billion times in succession, it is referring to Jesus. And it is right to do so. For the early Jewish Christ-followers who knew the book of Isaiah well, and were passionately following Jesus, they were convinced that Jesus was the one who would establish and uphold the throne of David and bring about endless peace.
But Isaiah wasn’t talking about Jesus, of course. He was talking about Hezekiah. The reading we heard today is from chapter 9, which means it is First Isaiah. It comes from the time before the exile, and is almost certainly an enthronement anthem for King Hezekiah. Remember Ahaz had been such a pillock, and Hezekiah was Isaiah’s great hope to turn around the fortunes of the southern kingdom? You can imagine these words being sung to identify Hezekiah’s status and firmly stamp Isaiah’s view of what a good king should look like. So before Handel set it to music, it was already a banger designed to cement Hezekiah’s grip on power and Isaiah’s agenda for the spiritual life of the nation.
Under Ahaz, the people walked in darkness. But now under Hezekiah, they are seeing a great light. They are rejoicing like they do when they get a big harvest or after winning a mighty battle. They were under a yoke, like field animals, but that has now been broken, just like it did when Gideon beat the Midianites.
It’s helpful to pause for a moment and remember Gideon, because the reference is not included by accident. I like Gideon because he is highly sceptical. The Angel of the Lord comes to visit Gideon at Ophrah and says ‘The Lord is with you, mighty warrior’ and Gideon replies ‘If the Lord is with us, why is everything so bloody terrible?’ (I’m paraphrasing slightly). The Angel tells Gideon that he will lead the rebellion against the Midianites and Gideon makes the angel wait while he cooks a baby goat and some bread, then he presents the food to the angel and the angel taps it with a stick and it all bursts into fire. And then Gideon believes the angel. Gideon gets to work breaking down the altars of Baal and the poles of Asherah, the false gods, but when God tells Gideon to go to war against the Midianites, Gideon is all like ‘now just hold on a second here, I’m going to need some proof first’. Gideon lays out a fleece and says he will believe God if in the morning the fleece is wet and the ground is dry. So God does that. Gideon is pretty happy with that, but he says ‘look don’t get mad, but we’re going to do the experiment again and this time I want the ground to be wet and the fleece to be dry’ and God does that and Gideon is convinced. Gideon is basically behaving like a Year Nine boy at this point, but clearly God has a purpose.
Gideon has to attack the Midianites, but God doesn’t want him to do it with all 32,000 troops because if he did, people wouldn’t know God was involved. So 10,000 of them get sent home. Then God decides to divide up the troops by the way they drink water. They go down to the spring, and 300 of them get down on their hands and knees and lap water like a dog. The rest get on their knees and scoop water into their hands, like someone who is not weird. God tells Gideon to keep the weirdos and send the rest home. With the 300, Gideon does a smoke and mirrors routine on the Midianites. All 300 are given a trumpet, an empty jar and a torch. In the middle of the night, they blow 300 trumpets and pull out 300 lit torches. The Midianites do some quick maths and panic, and Gideon wins the day.
Now when Isaiah refers to Midianites in his enthronement anthem for Hezekiah, it is very deliberate. Because Hezekiah and Jerusalem are the little guys, and the Assyrians will be soon be back. Sure enough, Sennacherib’s mighty army will besiege Jerusalem, but Hezekiah will defeat them with his wall and his tunnel (and quite a lot of bribery).
The titles that Isaiah bestows on Hezekiah may seem a bit over the top - Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace’ - until we appreciate that kingly titles for the Judeans were not meant to describe the king himself, but the God the king served. The name Hezekiah itself means ‘God strengthens’. The Enthronement Anthem is partly to praise Hezekiah, but primarily to praise God.
Now you’re probably wondering about your useful fact for this week, and I want to assure you that I would never disappoint you. This week’s useful fact is: the book of Isaiah is the fulcrum of the whole of the scriptures. The fulcrum is what you use to lever something or balance something. And the whole bible leans on Isaiah. It has everything. Fiery prophets and good and bad kings, battles and exile and political conflict, economic struggle and social upheaval, beautiful poetry and terrifying imagery. It refers to nearly every other book, and nearly every other book refers to it. It is one of the best known and one of the worst understood texts.
This is the last in a series on Isaiah that has been six sermons long, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. But in exploring this long and complicated book just a little, I hope we are living out that distinctively Anglican approach to the bible, where we don’t claim that is without error, or that it is infallible, where we don’t claim that it always make sense, or is always inspirational or positive, but where we say that the scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation, because they point us always towards Jesus who is the Word of God, whose body and blood nourishes us in the Eucharist, and whose body we are, a body that sits with the scriptures for a time, then goes off into the world to serve.
The Lord Be With You