Good News Wrapped Around the Broken

Isaiah had already called God's hungry people
to a feast that cost nothing.
But the people his words were for
sat in ashes.

Babylon's army had burned Jerusalem.
Many people had been killed,
and many more were marched away as prisoners.
The ones who were left sat down in the gray dust
and poured it over their heads.
(In those days, ashes in your hair told the neighbors
that your heart was broken.
They did not have to ask.)

Isaiah lived long before that sad day,
but God let him see it coming
and gave him a song for the people in the ashes.
The singer is someone who is still coming,
and he sings it like this:

"The Spirit of the Lord GOD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me."

(To anoint means to pour oil on someone's head.
That is how Israel's kings were chosen.
The oil smelled sweet, and there was plenty of it,
so it ran down into the new king's beard,
and anyone standing near could smell that God had picked him.)

"He has sent me with good news for the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,"

the way a mother wraps a clean cloth
around a cut knee
and keeps her hand on it
until the crying stops.

"to tell the prisoners, You are free!
to open the doors of the dark places,
to announce the year of the LORD's favor,
and the day when our God will judge."

(God's law already had a year like that.
Every fiftieth year, slaves walked home free,
and families got back the land they had sold.)

"He has sent me to comfort all who mourn,
everyone in Zion crying for what they lost.
I will give them
a crown instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of tears,
a coat of praise
instead of a spirit too tired to lift its head."

That is a strange trade.
Hold out a bucket of ashes to a king
and ask for his crown,
and his guards will carry you out by the elbows.
In this song the giver takes the ashes
and hands back the crown.

"They will be called oaks," the song goes on,
"trees that grow straight and right,
planted by the LORD
to show how glorious he is."

Ashes are what is left when a tree burns down.
God was promising to turn the ashes
back into trees.

Isaiah wrote the song down,
but he could not open one prison door
or lift the dust off one head.
For seven hundred years the scroll was read
while people waited and waited
for the Anointed One, the Messiah.

Then, on a day of rest, in the meeting house in Nazareth,
a carpenter's son
stood up, and someone handed him Isaiah's scroll.
He found this very song
and read as far as the year of the LORD's favor.
He stopped in the middle of the line,
just before the part about God's day of judging,
rolled up the scroll, and sat down.

"Today," he said,
"this Scripture has come true
while you were listening."

It was Jesus, God's Anointed One.
He began the great trade that day.
The part he left unread waits for his coming back,
when he will lift the last ashes off the last head,
and there will not be one speck of gray left anywhere.