Journal: Southeastern Theological Review
Volume: STR 04:2 (Winter 2013)
Article: Undoing ‘This People’, Becoming ‘My Servant’: Purpose And Commission In "Isaiah" 6
Author: Caroline Batchelder

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STR 4:2 (Winter 2013) p. 155

Undoing ‘This People’, Becoming ‘My Servant’:
Purpose And Commission In Isaiah 6

Caroline Batchelder

Morling College, Australia

“This is the end—for me the beginning of life”1

Introduction

The significance of chapter 6 within the book of Isaiah has been fiercely debated.2 If it is a ‘call narrative’, why is it not located in Isaiah’s opening chapters, as are the call narratives of Jeremiah and Ezekiel? And how can a ‘sending’ which so overturns the usual concept of Yahweh’s soteriological purpose—that the word of Yahweh is sent to bring people to repentance—rightly belong to a prophetic call? The resolution of these two questions seems, to me, to be the mark of a viable canonical reading, not only of chapter 6, but of the whole of Isaiah. This essay will explore a resolution to these questions based on the form of the text of chapter 6 within Isaiah. I hope to demonstrate that the text itself acts as a guide into a particular way of reading. This way of reading, in turn, will ground my thesis that the book of Isaiah presents the figure of the Servant (developed in chapters 40–55) as the human who fulfils the relation to Yahweh for which humanity was created.

Isaiah 6 is the account of a remarkable enlargement of perspective for the one who is ‘I’ in the text, 3and secondarily, but very importantly, for the reader, who (as I will show) becomes ‘I’ through the text. The vision of chapter 6 is recounted as a shift in perception made by one who is ‘undone’ by confrontation with an overwhelming reality (6:4), and tracks for the reader the process of change from ordinary human perspective to the perspective that marks the whole prophecy of Isaiah.4

STR 4:2 (Winter 2013) p. 156

Chapter 6 comes at the end of a litany of disregarded prophetic appeals to Judah to ‘turn’.5 It is a last-ditch effort, not for repentance, because that is now too late, but to plant a seed for a future beyond the end; the seed of a new kind of person in relat...

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