LENT 2020: Day 35

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• Monday, April 6, 2020: Monday of Holy Week
  Isaiah 42.1-9; Psalm 36.5-11; Hebrews 9.11-15; John 12.1-11

          Thus said God, the LORD,
              Creator of the heavens...
    The first things, look, they have happened,
          and the new things I do tell,
              before they spring forth I inform you.

As rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel observes in his book on the prophets, the Hebrew God is a god of pathos, a god who experiences emotions, a god who suffers.

This is in contrast with the Greek idea of god as unmoved and unchanging, as lacking pathos, as a-pathos, as apathetic.

Apathetic.

If you don’t experience emotions, if you are incapable of being moved and changed by experience, if you don’t suffer, then you are apathetic. You lack pathos.

And that’s not consistent with the God of the prophets.

An apathetic god, I might add, is not worthy of worship.

Here in Second Isaiah, the LORD suffers with and for a people in exile — and announces that a new day dawns.

And immediately following our reading, the prophet says this:
    Sing to the LORD a new song.

“The old songs,” writes Walter Brueggemann, ”spoke about all that had failed. But new song time is a way to sing a new social reality.”

When “the funeral is ended...it is festival time.”

It is still funeral time, and we must grieve now. It is good and right and necessary to do so.

But we long to sing a new song. And we can trust the LORD that festival time is coming, so we are not “fated to despair.”