It was from Isaiah that Jesus read when He began His ministry in Nazareth. He unrolled the scroll handed to Him and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me...This day this Scripture is fulfilled in your ears.”
It was from Isaiah that the Ethiopian eunuch was reading when the Holy Spirit called the disciple Philip to run to his chariot. “Do you understand what you’re reading?” Philip asked. When the eunuch confessed he did not and asked for an explanation, Philip told him the passage—“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so He did not open His mouth”—was a prophecy about Jesus that had just come to pass. The inspired Ethiopian then asked Philip to baptize him.
It was with the text of Isaiah that Handel composed his masterpiece Messiah. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God,” the oratorio begins. “Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned...”
It was the book of Isaiah that Van Gogh turned to in his 1885 work entitled Still Life with Bible, painted on the occasion of the death of his father, a Dutch pastor and preacher. Van Gogh scrawled “Isaiah 53” at the top of the page of the open Bible he painted, and though the text block beneath these words is indecipherable, Van Gogh dashed warm golds and glowing blues in their midst, suggesting the words of this Prophet struck him as both vibrant and alive.
It was the book of Isaiah, specifically Isaiah 25, that inspired author Harper Lee’s original title of the earliest drafts of the novel that became To Kill a Mockingbird. This proto-novel, published in 2015 as a kind of sequel to her masterpiece, was entitled Go Set a Watchman. “For thus hath the Lord said unto me,” Isaiah 21:6 tells us, “Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”
It was the book of Isaiah, this very same chapter in fact, to which Bob Dylan alludes in his song “All Along the Watchtower.” Compare here how Isaiah’s striking words and Dylan’s lyrics track.
Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield...And he cried, a lion...And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, ‘Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.’
All along the watchtower,
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went,
Barefoot servants too.
Outside, in the distance,
A wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching,
The wind began to howl.
What’s called the Isaiah Wall stands directly across from the United Nations Building in New York City, engraved with these words:
And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Not far from there, a bronze statue entitled Let Us Beat Swords Into Plowshares depicts a heroic man doing exactly this.
And it was Isaiah that Martin Luther King, Jr. turned to in the climax of his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. After repeating the iconic words over and over, stirring up a series of images grounded in the present moment from Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, King’s oration then transcended time and place, just as his aspirations themselves did. “I have a dream,” he finally proclaimed, quoting Isaiah 40, “that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”
In all these ways, the words of Isaiah have continued to rain down upon us through history, offering us a new vision of life and arousing a powerful creative spark within us. And if the past is any indication, it’s unlikely this will ever end.
God—Thank you for the eternal words of the Prophet. Amen.
