This is an unpublished sermon preached by Robert Jenson on March 29, 1995 on Isaiah 12.1-6, which I found in the collection at the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton last month.
Here again is an instance of Jenson’s maxim, doubling as a method, that theology proves itself in the pulpit, or it has not yet proven itself at all. It took a while for my friend and colleague to find a device that could play the old cassette tape. Listening to Jenson take up the prophet’s canticle, “You will say in that day,” I was glad, and not surprised, to find the load-bearing claims of his mature theology arriving intact in the pulpit.
Jenson opens with a rubric, not a text. At Oxford, he recalls, the preacher was required to intone, “Ye shall pray for,” before naming that week’s concerns; meanwhile, Isaiah’s “you will say in that day” does the identical work.
The prophet does not predict.
Isaiah instructs.
In other words, the gospel, on this reading, is never a report you might find persuasive. It is address that constitutes the one addressed. You do not evaluate a rubric; you are given it to say.
From there Jenson refuses, in a single aside, the whole therapeutic captivity of mainline preaching. The wolf lying down with the lamb, the earth full of the knowledge of God, the exiles gathered into one love— none of this is about “a hard semester.” “If you don’t have anything worse than that,” he quips, “thank God,” and moves on. Jenson, as preacher, does not waste any time attempting to establish a point of contact with his hearers’ felt needs. God’s gospel is after bigger ends. The frame is cosmic before it is personal.
Christianity declares the final destiny of God’s universe.
The gospel is not a coping technique for the meantime.
The meantime is not thereby emptied but only relocated. The rubric, Jenson notes, was built for reuse, a temple prayer for “whenever someone experienced God’s help,” so its grammar reaches backward and requires our small thanksgivings be spoken as if each were already the last day. Nothing in an ordinary life earns significance by resembling the end. It earns significance by being folded into the End without remainder.
Two recurring features of Jenson’s theology— commitments, I should say— are the necessity of ongoing Israel for the church’s own intelligibility and a candid assessment that the way God governs present day history risks the conclusion that either God is wicked or God is not. These commitments appear in this sermon where Jenson pauses, mid-sermon, on a discomfort he refuses to resolve.
“I do not understand how the synagogue sustains it at all,” he says, “and am lost in wonder that they do.”
A lesser preacher might take this moment to score a point. Where Israel waits in vain, the church waits fulfilled. Jenson refuses such a move. He names the synagogue’s endurance as wonder, not deficiency, and claims for the church only this difference, one further reminder along the same road. It is the same refusal he argues at length elsewhere as Christology. Israel’s mission was never superseded, only, in the resurrection, carried and concentrated in one Israelite still bearing it.
The hinge, as always in Jenson, is Easter. The resurrection of the crucified Jesus is proof not of a coming day but rather is that day’s concrete arrival ahead of schedule. “There has been a big pointer and reminder,” he says, and means an actual raised body, not an assurance. Therefore, the sermon can end where it must, not informing the congregation that permission to sing exists somewhere up ahead, but handing the permission over now: “You may say today.”
The sermon does not describe the gospel’s arrival.
The preached word is the arrival.
The present-tense is the only tense preaching ever really has.
Notice, too, who is doing the addressing. The pulpit image recurs. God has “stared down from his pulpit” to say we will wait, and at the last, “God looks down from the pulpit” to say we may now sing. This comment is neither decorative nor accidental . Jenson’s God is not a changeless summit, indifferent to whether anyone below is listening. The LORD is a loquacious agent who speaks and requires an answer, himself located, however impossibly, at the place from which address occurs.
Jenson’s actualist doctrine of God argued at length in the dogmatics— God as what happens, not what remains once event is subtracted— appears here as a single recurring picture, small enough for a nine-minute sermon to carry without strain.
Above all, this is nine minutes on an ancient canticle, and it does more theological work than most treatments of eschatology manage in a chapter, because it refuses the one move theology is always tempted toward: waiting until the argument is finished to say the gospel. Jenson says it on the way to proving it.
For Jenson preaching is the only way the proof of God ever arrives.
“You May Say Today”
During the years I taught at Oxford, Blanche and I sometimes on a Sunday morning attended the so-called university sermon. This was a service held in the university church, very much like this one. A sermon, always by an invited preacher, with opening and closing exercises, the famous chapel sandwich.
But the invited preacher had one responsibility St. Olaf Chapel speakers do not. He or she was required to lead from the pulpit an ancient form of prayer that had been used for those services since Queen Elizabeth’s time. The preacher would mount up to the high pulpit, stare down at us sternly, and say, “Ye shall pray for.” Then came a list of the week’s university concerns.
I open with this almost entirely irrelevant account for its likeness to the salient feature of the text — the text repeated, “you will say on that day.” For these are not predictions. These are instructions. Like the university preachers, they are to use — the churchy word — rubrics, the kind of thing that the first part of the Lutheran Book of Worship is filled up with, rules for what to do next in church.
Indeed, it seems likely that our text is a piece of the service book from the Jerusalem Temple that has somehow found its way into Isaiah’s text. When that day arrives, Isaiah’s readers have their orders about what to say. The question, of course, is what day is that?
Now, if we look at the text, what we are then to say, and at the text’s context in the book of Isaiah, it is clear what day is first in question: the great day when God’s good will for his creatures is finally done. The day — to pick up verses from around our text — when the wolf shall lie down with the lamb and a little child will lead them, when no one shall any longer hurt or destroy, when the earth will be full of the knowledge of God, when God’s people will be assembled from all their various exiles to be a single community of love.
That, you know, is what Christianity, like Judaism, is finally about. Christianity is finally about expectation of a final burst of glory, of the transformation of all creation into a single explosion of love. Judaism and Christianity are not first and foremost about all the little religious and personal concerns we want them to be about. They are about the final destiny of God’s universe and of God’s humanity within an infinite burst of God’s own love.
Such fabulous, indeed insane hope is, moreover, not an option for God’s people. For we have our instruction. You will hold yourselves ready, we are instructed, to give thanks on that day for God’s mercy and salvation, for his deeds among the nations, for his greatness in the midst of a transformed humanity.
It has been a long wait. A long time tensely waiting for our cue, for the day to come, for this song to be sung. Two millennia now for the Christians, and a few centuries more tacked on before that for the Jews. But we have no choice. God has stared down from his pulpit and said, “You will wait for that day.” What is in fact actually awaiting you sitting there, as the conclusion and only real point of your lives, is an inconceivable day of divine love and glory, and you have no choice but to hold yourselves ready for your cue.
But just here there is a complication that makes things even more strenuous. “You will say in that day” is a rubric. That is to say, it is instructions for something that is expected sometimes to be repeated. In the temple services, the prayers — “I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me,” and so forth, or “sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously” — these prayers were like those in the Lutheran Book of Worship, ready for use on appropriate occasions, whenever someone experienced God’s help, whenever there were deeds of God to be praised.
Here is where the little religious and moral and personal concerns so precious to us come back into the picture. But see in what sort of connection. We are instructed to give thanks to God for the good things in our lives as if each time it were the last day, and we were in glory.
Frankly, I get a little tired of hearing in chapel about students’ great trials of tests and papers and relationship troubles. I mean, if you don’t have anything worse than that, thank God — I suppose I ought not say that. For they, and God’s mercy in them, have their place in the Christian story. But we must see what that place is. They are pointers and reminders, and intrinsically unimportant anticipations of the great day of the Lord, when God’s people, in one flame of love, will say, “Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously.”
It has been a long wait for that day. I do not understand how the synagogue sustains it at all, and I am lost in wonder that they do. How Christians sustain it, on the other hand, is clear. For there has been a big pointer and reminder, along with the little ones that make up our lives. There has been a big pointer and reminder, and an important anticipation of the great day of the Lord, when the Lord defeated death and forgave sin and raised our Lord Jesus from the dead.
There has been a big reminder and pointer and anticipation of the great day of the Lord — that Easter, for the celebration of which the Church intends our text, and all the texts of Lent, to prepare us. Every Easter we can say, “Surely God is my salvation, I will trust and will not be afraid. Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” We can take up the song appointed for that day, every Easter, able to wait for the one great day, because we see it at Easter already breaking.
At Easter, God looks down from the pulpit and says, “You may say today: sing praise to the Lord, for he has done gloriously.”
