And Their Words to the Ends of the World

Scripture — Isaiah 49:5-6 (NRSV)

And now the Lord says,
who formed me in the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him,
and that Israel might be gathered to him,
for I am honored in the sight of the Lord,
and my God has become my strength—
he says,
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Devotion

The last thing you expected from me three weeks after Christmas Day was a Messiah reference, right? I’ve written here several times about learning and performing Messiah in college every December, and if you know Messiah at all (either from my writing about it or independently) you’ll probably be most familiar with the Christmas portions. However, it wasn’t in its original conception a Christmas oratorio at all. It was first performed in April of 1742, and while its first part tells the story of the Nativity, its second and third parts clearly carry the story forward to the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and in fact the end of time and Christ’s Second Coming. (There are a lot of places online where you can find the entire libretto (text) of Messiah with the verse references; I like this one because it has a lot of other information as well.)

Even if you knew that much, you might still never have heard the chorus that today’s text put me in mind of: “Their Sound is Gone Out Into All Lands.” (I’ll admit that the text in Messiah itself is drawn from Romans 10:8 and that Paul got it from Psalm 19, but it’s a concept also well expressed here in Isaiah 49:6). It’s in the second part of Messiah, the one which deals with the Crucifixion and Resurrection, but even when this part is performed people have been known to cut directly from #33, the justly famous and jubilant Resurrection-celebrating “Lift Up Your Heads,” directly to #40, “Why Do the Nations,” the beginning of the sequence on the resurrected Lord defeating his enemies which culminates in “Hallelujah.” By doing so, though, performers leave out an entire section about Christ ascending into heaven and the news of Christ’s triumph being spread throughout the world by “the company of the preachers,” whose “sound is gone out into all lands, and their words unto the ends of the world.”

Y’all, that’s us.

Which, in a roundabout way, leads me into why this text from Isaiah, also about spreading the word and the kingdom of God to the whole world, is assigned for the Season after the Epiphany. We may associate Epiphany chiefly with the three Magi—and that is indeed what the Feast of the Epiphany celebrates—but the weeks between January 6 and Ash Wednesday, whenever it arrives (this year on February 18), are about the manifestation of Christ’s glory and the unveiling of his mission—oftentimes in ways no one expected, but ways which are significant nonetheless.

We didn’t raise Christ from the dead, and we can’t singlehandedly reveal his glory. (I think that’s a pretty good thing to remember). But what we can do, what we are called to do in this season—which, like the second part of Messiah, bridges the beauty of the Nativity to the terror of the Cross and the splendor of the Resurrection—is spread the news.

The link two paragraphs above traces back ultimately to something my husband and I wrote many years ago and have tried to live by ever since, and I’m going to quote it in closing as both an Epiphany blessing and a prophetic charge:

As the Christmas season’s endpoint, Epiphany sends us into the world to live out the Incarnation, to witness to the light of Christ in the darkness. Following Jesus we have been baptized into his death and Resurrection. Whether we are called to martyrdom, or to prophetic witness, or simply to faithful living in the joys and sorrows of our daily lives, we live all our days in the knowledge of our dignity, redeemed through Christ and united to God.

And we spread his Word to the ends of the world.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Servant at Work (Isaiah 40ff.).