Count the Context

Take Isaiah 61, or actually most of the poetry of Isaiah.  Imagine a rather plain man with an exciting message, walking in the dust just like he was processing into the Temple, full of a message that trumped the circumstance!

Isaiah is preaching to refugees.  People who are exiled, and have been for a long time.  People in refugee camps longing to go home.

Consider the Advent/New Year messages:  every valley shall be lifted up, every mountain and hill made low, the road prepared for the way home.  The road that was brutal getting here is the road that God will make accessible for homeward travel.

Great and powerful poetry, to WHOM?  To the prosperous?  To the comfortable IN their homeland?  To the ones all well-spoken-of?  Not at all - to the ridiculed, the down-played, sometimes vilified foreigners in a sophisticated land.  God did not ADOPT the Babylonians;  God USED the Babylonians, and Cyrus the Persian, unbelievers to accomplish what he wanted.

Anything to do with our contemporary situation?  Has God decided to side with the prosperous who use the right labels, instead of the helpless, the outcast, the downtrodden who are children ALSO of Abraham who succumb to hate instead of love?  Has God decided to do a strange thing, loving those we love and hating those we hate, instead of insisting that we do a new thing, loving those whom he loves and hating no one?

Worth pondering.  Worth praying over.  Worth using as a corrective to the easy arrogance that comes to us, and upon us, so easily.  God's good news through Isaiah may be better good news than we sometimes give credit to.