LENT 2020: Day 24

• Lent 2020: Day 24 Tuesday, March 24, 2020:
  Psalm 146; Isaiah 42:14-21; Colossians 1:9-14

     “I have been silent a very long time,
          Kept my peace, held myself in check —
    Like a woman in labor now I shriek,
          I gasp and also pant.”

In his commentary on Isaiah, Robert Alter writes: “These words answer a theological quandary that would have plagued the exiles: where is the God of Israel, why does He allow us to be reduced to this lowly state?”

Many among us today face a similar theological quandary. Where is God? Why has God allowed this to happen to us?

Alter continues: “What God says is that He has chosen to be silent and hold back, but that moment is now past.”

For God is in labor…
    shrieking (pa’ah)...
          gasping (nasham)...
              panting (sha’aph)...

Lauren Winner recalls her initial reaction to reading this: “I felt profoundly uncomfortable. I felt disturbed.”

But, she now says: “Isaiah gives us this groaning woman as a picture of the sovereign God, the God who is in control of redemption: God chooses to participate in the work of new creation with bellowing and panting.”

And she continues: “God chooses a participation that does not fight the pain, but that works from inside the pain.”

Winner then issues a call to action: “I suggest that we read in Isaiah 42 a suggestion that we — we who worship the God who has redeemed and is redeeming us — participate and play a role in the birthing process.

May it be so.