Isaiah looked over the horizon of his day and glimpsed a new day when life would be so different to the ways he was experiencing that the only way he could describe it was as a ‘new heavens and a new earth’!
The seemingly fruitless struggle that characterised so much of his people’s history would come to a close. Something altogether new was to be created - not by the people themselves - but by the hand of the one who watches over and created them in the first place.
The tenor and flavour of this new creation would be as different from the existing experience of life as chalk is to cheese. Rather than fear as the central organizing dynamic of communal life, there would be rejoicing and gladness.
Isaiah could not have known that what he was glimpsing... what he was hoping for... was the way of Jesus of Nazareth. The way of self-giving that goes beyond death and on into resurrection life!
