Then the Lord God Will Wipe Away the Tears from All Faces

Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
    and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
    for the Lord has spoken.
It will be said on that day,
    “See, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.
    This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
    let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”

(Isaiah 25:8-9, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

“Now the LORD is about to lay waste the earth and make it desolate.”

The twenty-fourth chapter of Isaiah begins with an apocalypse—in the literal sense of the term, an overwhelming revelation from a divine source. Isaiah’s vision also fulfills the ordinary sense of apocalypse, an account of events so disastrous they will bring about the end of our world. (Theologians and religious scholars refer to this type of apocalypse as an eschaton, from the ancient Greek for “last thing.” So, properly speaking, most “apocalyptic” stories would be more precisely defined as “eschatological.”)

Isaiah’s prophecy spares no one. Enslavers and enslaved, high priests and ordinary people, all shall suffer alike: 

“The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants,
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.
Therefore a curse devours the earth
and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt.”

This warning resonated with the people of conquered Zion, half a millennium before the birth of Jesus—and it resonated with early Quakers in mid-seventeenth-century England, who felt themselves living in “a world turned upside down” by civil war, royal execution, and Puritan rule. Perhaps, in these days of escalating climate crisis and encroaching authoritarianism, it resonates with some of us.

You can probably find people in every age who believed in the immanence of the eschaton. If such fears seem especially prevalent today, keep in mind we have robust media systems that spread news at a breadth unimaginable to our ancestors. Every day, we learn of disasters taking place in every corner of the planet—and, every year, a group of scientists tells us whether humanity has moved closer to or further away from complete annihilation.

(This January, they set the doomsday clock at 89 seconds to midnight, the tightest margin we’ve ever faced. As a point of comparison, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the clock read 11:53.)

But Isaiah’s message offered more than terror. 

He did not intend his listeners to resign themselves to doom. Even as “the kings of the earth… will be gathered together like prisoners in a pit,” their mighty cities reduced to rubble, Isaiah announced that a holy kingdom would reign on Mount Zion, where

“the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich foods filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.”

The prophet saw so much significance in this visionary scene he repeated the details for emphasis, and even expanded upon them in the reprise. Clearly, he wanted the people of Zion to remain faithful to God, so they would not miss out on the celebration.

But why would God throw such a party? Because, Isaiah promises, “he will destroy… the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the covering that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.”

You can see why Christian readers latched on to these verses in Isaiah and decided he had received a vision of their own future paradise, promised to them by Jesus. For that matter, you can see how Jesus himself drew upon Isaiah’s prophetic legacy in the message he shared with first-century Judaeans… and, George Fox and other early Quakers believed, that he continued (and continues) to share with those capable of hearing.

This world may seem to us like a vale of tears, just as it may have seemed so to the first Friends. But, as Psalm 84 declares, “happy are those whose strength is in [God].” Such people have “the highways to Zion” running straight through their hearts; not only will God wipe the tears from their faces, but they will find the valley transformed into a place of abundant, flowing springs.

But will we accept our invitation to the banquet in Zion?

I’m not suggesting we’ll all meet at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (the site of Isaiah’s “Mount Zion”) for a gala celebration. I don’t even think Isaiah meant readers to take his vision that literally, although he did see Jerusalem as the center of God’s peaceable kingdom. And though most Friends worldwide would still see that kingdom specifically as Christ’s, some of us have adopted broader views of its spiritual dimensions.

Setting all that aside, though, can we accept the existence of a guiding force greater than ourselves and enter into a covenantal relationship with each other based on our mutual recognition of that force and how it summons us? Can we sincerely believe this relationship will change our lives, even transform sorrow to joy, and liberate us from the fear of death?