Commentary on Isaiah 5.2.3–5.2.10

And this would befit, as I said just now, the leaders of the churches, who also say out of very great joy: “He subjected peoples to us and nations under our feet; he chose for us his inheritance.” For the inheritance most fitting to Christ alone and truly is to lead the others. Therefore he also commanded that no one be called Rabbi: “For one,” he says, “is your leader, the Christ.” But just as, being himself the true light, he called the holy apostles light; and just as, being by nature and alone truly Son, he has given us who believe in him authority to call God Father, since we are enriched with the dignity of sonship; so also, being himself leader of all and having the world under heaven as his inheritance, he has given the thing to the saints, crowning them with his own glory, because they have become his fellow workers, and, as genuine guardians of peoples, have gained many, bringing to him through faith those who worshipped the creation instead of him and did not know the way of the excellent life. “You will make desolate cities to be inhabited” you will understand as follows: So great, he says, will be the multitude of your seed that the cities full of inhabitants will not suffice for them, but they will be able to fill even the deserted ones.

“… because you were reproached; for you will forget the eternal shame, and the reproach of your widowhood you will not remember; for the Lord who makes you, the Lord … is his name; and he who delivered you, he the God of Israel, shall be called in all the earth.”

We have been justified in Christ, “not by works of righteousness which we ourselves did, but according to his great mercy”; so the all-wise Paul writes. For we have been freed from darkness, error, and the unholiness handed down from our fathers, in that we worshipped the creation rather than the Creator, and no form of wickedness was left unpractised by the flocks of the nations; for, as the psalmist says, “All turned aside, together they became worthless; there was none who did good, not even one.” This, then, became a reproach to the nations: I mean the very going astray, and the harms that result from going astray. For what makes the soul so unseemly and most unlovely and … countless … as to depart from the living God and to choose to worship the unclean spirits instead of him, and to sink into the swamps of sin as into mud and mire? But what does the lover of humankind say to those who are called to the forgiveness of sin through faith, plainly faith in him? “Do not fear because you were put to shame.” For since, altogether, as a father has compassion on his sons, the Lord has had compassion on those who fear him, and as far as the east is from the west he has removed our iniquities from us, how was it not fitting that for the stumbles of old … God, not exacting the penalty from the guilty? And

Christ at any rate said, showing that the time of his coming was one of gentleness: “For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” So, as freed from penalty and not expecting punishment for our offenses, we have had a mind free from fears, nor do we remember the former … For grace prevails, justifying the … For as the all-wise Paul says: “It is God who justifies; who is the one who condemns?” And since the Master of all bears no grudge, who will reproach us with the filth of the stumbles made in ignorance? “You will forget, then,” he says, “the eternal shame” (meaning long-lasting), “and the reproach of your widowhood you will not remember.” The reproach of widowhood is that those from the nations were never able in any way to bear fruit to God during the time when they went astray. For there was not among them, as I said, the bridegroom from heaven, the giver of spiritual fruitfulness, who places in each soul the beginnings of good seeds. At any rate in the gospel parables he shows himself to us as such, saying: “The sower went out to sow his seed.” And in what way the reproach of her widowhood will be removed, he declares, saying: “For the Lord who makes you, the Lord of Hosts is his name.” “Who makes you,” he says, instead of “who creates you and transforms you into a different way of conduct and into a seemly life”; for we are re-formed in Christ into newness of holy and evangelical life, rising to his beauty through the Spirit, so that from then on we are seen as other people than we were. At any rate he said concerning the nations through the voice of Ezekiel: “And I will take out their heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may know me, that I am the Lord.” And in very many places he names those who turn from the nations “a generation to come” and “a people being created.” And the divine Paul says: “And we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord, the Spirit.” Christ, then, has created us, that is, the two peoples into one new man, making peace and reconciling both in one body to the Father. At any rate we have been commanded to put off the old man, which is corrupted according to the desires of deceit, and to put on the new, which is renewed according to the image of the one who created him, plainly Christ. “I, then, am the Lord of Hosts who makes you,” he says, that is, who creates and reshapes you. And so that the thing may not be disbelieved by some because of its magnificence, he names himself again Lord of the powers, usefully and necessarily. And what the time of the transformation, that is, of the re-creation, is, he made clear by saying: “He who delivered you, he the God of Israel, shall be called in all the earth.” And when was this accomplished at all? At the time of the coming, plainly. For Christ has reigned over all the nations, and this the prophet teaches, saying: “And the Lord shall be one, and his name one, encircling all the earth.”

For of old God was known in Judea alone. But since the multitude of the nations has been called through faith to the knowledge of him, henceforth every knee shall bow to him, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. God, then, shall be called in all the earth, he who delivered us, took us out of the devil's perversity, and brought us under his own sceptres. And this the blessed David teaches, saying at one time, “Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to the God of Jacob; for the Lord Most High is fearsome, a great King over all the earth,” and at another again, “The Lord has become king; let the earth rejoice.”

“Not as a woman forsaken and faint-hearted has the Lord called you, nor as a wife hated from youth, said God. For a short … I will have mercy on you. In a little wrath I turned my face away from you, and with eternal mercy I will have mercy on you, said the Lord who delivered you.”

It is the custom of the inspired Scripture to call “forsaken” a woman who has been cast out for some reasons, one to whom, according to the law of Moses, a bill of divorce was thrown by the man who lived with her; and again to call “hated” one who has been slandered for disorderliness and an unseemly life. To her faint-heartedness too would fit … to bear the yokes of marriage, or turning to what is not lawful, and being negligent about fulfilling whatever makes for good order. Such was the synagogue of the Jews toward the God who rules over all. For he brought her into spiritual kinship through the all-wise Moses and, though she was like a woman who had played the harlot in Egypt by choosing to think as the Egyptians did and worshipping gods there, he all but took her into his house. Then, when she wished … to apostasy (for she worshipped the works of her own hands), he thrust her away and made her a stranger to kinship with him, and as a hated and faint-hearted woman he put her out of the house. At any rate he said through one of the holy prophets to those of Israel's blood: “Plead with your mother, plead, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. And I will remove her harlotry from before my face, and her adultery from between her breasts, and I will kill her with thirst; and on her children I will have no mercy, for they are children of harlotry; for their mother played the harlot; she who bore them acted shamefully.” And what was the manner of her harlotry he made clear, saying through the voice of Ezekiel: “Son of man, will you not judge Oholah and Oholibah (that is, Jerusalem and Samaria), and declare to them their lawless deeds? For they committed adultery, and blood is on their hands; [with their imaginings] they committed adultery; and their children whom they bore to me they led through the fire. Even these things they did to me: they defiled my holy places and profaned my Sabbaths; and when they slaughtered their children to their idols, they went into my holy places to profane them.” For in Samaria were ten tribes and the half-tribe of Ephraim, and in Jerusalem the tribe of Judah and the half-tribe of Benjamin; but both these and those acted impiously beyond measure, or rather to the limit of all … “With their imaginings they committed adultery”; that is, the idols which they themselves invented they made the occasion of a kind of spiritual adultery and harlotry, turning their hearts away from the one who had taken them in the position of a wife …

God. At any rate the God of all said to the synagogue of the Jews through the voice of Jeremiah: “You had the look of a harlot; you became shameless toward all; you did not call me as house and father and guide of your virginity.” He fittingly calls the mother of the Jews, who played the harlot, a forsaken woman, faint-hearted, hated from youth. But he speaks to the nations, and says that they too have not been called to the knowledge of Christ in the same way as she who was forsaken, faint-hearted, and hated from youth. For in the synagogue of the Jews a hardening came in part, as the all-wise Paul says; and their eyes were darkened so as not to see, and their back was bent, that is, they have had a mind always looking downward and gazing at earthly things. But to those from the nations none of this happened; rather they were enlightened, and their back was not bent but spiritually straightened. Nor was only the remnant of the whole saved among them, as in Israel; rather their whole multitude was caught in the net through Christ, brought to salvation, freed from the charges of error, and escaped the abuse of the nooses of sin. She has been called, then, not as the rejected and hated woman. But “For a short time,” he says, “I forsook you, and with great mercy I will have mercy on you.” For in the generations gone by, as a disciple of Christ says, God allowed the nations to walk in their own ways; and this, I think, is the forsaking for a short time. For even if it seems to have lasted long ages, yet even so it shrinks to shortness. Many times greater, then, is the time of mercy, and it runs on to endless ages. So you will understand also what follows, that is: “In a little wrath I turned my face away from you, and with eternal mercy I will have mercy on you.” For short and contracted is the time of wrath compared with the length of the unceasing love for humankind given us by God, who also delivered us from the authority of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in light. And the great mercy would reasonably be understood as that given through Christ, which frees from all filth, delivers from punishment and penalty, brings back into kinship with him through sanctification, crowns with the glories of adoption, and makes heirs of the kingdom of heaven.

“From the water in Noah's time this is mine: as I swore to him at that time concerning the earth, not to be angry with you any more, nor at your threat to remove the mountains, nor shall the hills be moved; so neither shall my mercy toward you fail, nor the covenant of my peace …”

It is clearly written in the books of Moses that, when the whole earth had turned away into apostasy from God and had been carried down without restraint into many kinds of … (“nor your hills” …), the God over all, rightly grieved at these very things, says: “My Spirit shall not remain in these men, because they are flesh,” that is, in a merely fleshly mind; and this is abominable and hateful to him and full of all uncleanness. For this reason, as the Savior's disciple says, “he did not spare the ancient world,” but destroyed all, … Noah alone, gaining this as a reward of his obedience and submission. But when the flood abated and the mass of the waters subsided, he came out of the ark and sacrificed, and the sacred writing says that God smelled a fragrant odor; then

he promised the righteous man that he would never again bring a flood on the whole earth. So “From the water in Noah's time,” he says, “this is mine,” that is, this was determined and has prevailed with me: never again to be angry with the whole earth, nor to contend with human failings and decree one penalty against all. He hints through these words that at the time when Christ shone in the world also, when the whole earth was as it were caught in the nooses of deceit, and all had turned aside, and did not know the God who is God by nature, but had worshipped the works of their own hands and were yoked to the herds of demons, all would have had to undergo by divine sentence that ancient punishment. For where the charges are wholly equal, there surely the same penalty would not be unfitting. But I pass this by, he says, and what was promised remains firm with me. And just as, he says, I would not in wrath remove the mountains nor shake the hills, that is, change them into another form …, so neither will my mercy toward you fail, nor will the covenant of my peace be removed. And the arbiter of peace and of the covenant would be no other than our Lord Jesus Christ; for he is our peace, according to the Scriptures, and, rich in spiritual kinship with him, we have all been filled with good. And this, then, was what was clearly said through Isaiah to the Father and God in heaven: “O Lord our God, give us peace; for you have given us all things.” So in Christ we have gained the covenant of peace from God the Father; for we were joined to him through Christ as mediator, and he removed from the midst the sin that tore us apart, so that nothing might lie in the way of those who go to God. At any rate it is written: “The way of the pious has become straight, and the way of the pious is prepared,” those, that is, who run in kinship with God, the peace of all, plainly Christ, mediating this.

“For the Lord said: I will be gracious to you. Humble and unstable …”

Being good by nature and incomparably loving toward humankind, the God of all always gathers occasions somehow for justifying sinners by grace without remembering their wrongs. For he does not desire the death of the sinner so much as that he turn from his evil way and live. So the God of all himself will be gracious to you, he says. And for what reason? First, because Christ is gentle, good, and very merciful; then, because you have become humble and unstable. One may see these things in the minds of those who go astray, having fallen on them like a disease. For they are very [humble], that is, low-lying and trodden, as it were thrown on the ground, and lying there for any who wish to trample them; whereas the heart of the saints is not so at all. For they cannot be trodden by the attacks of the demons, but are set on high, as it were, and will not lie under monstrous desires.

Humble, as I said, is the heart of those who go astray, and besides this unstable, because it is in a way drunk and shaken toward desires condemned by the divine law, and toward … wickedness, as by every wind; and, as the writer of Proverbs says, they suffer the wandering of desire. Jerusalem suffered this through inclining to the deceits of the demons, and the God of all accused her, saying: “In the desires of her soul she was carried about by the wind.” And a soul carried about by the wind is surely unstable too. At any rate those devoted to God flee the disease as a cause of ruin, and indeed offer songs of thanksgiving as freed from the evil; for they say: “He set my feet upon the rock and directed my steps.” And it was said by God also to the mother of the Jews: “Set yourself up, Zion.” Indeed the all-wise Paul writes to some: “So let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” The soul of those who go astray, then, is outside the glories befitting the saints, for it is unstable. But since the Creator of all is merciful, as I said, he in a way pleads in defense of her who suffered this, and says: “You were not comforted.” For to those of Israel very great comfort was given by God, bringing them to spiritual vigor and bringing in the knowledge of what is useful and necessary for salvation. For the law through Moses was given to them, and a choir of holy prophets was raised up, flooding them with streams from heaven, as God sent down upon them like rain the most abundant comfort. But to the nations none of the saints spoke beforehand at all; for they were not tutored by the law through Moses, and they remained wholly without experience of prophetic words. So she was not comforted. And this is shown clearly through the gospel parable; for Christ said somewhere … his …; he did this about the first, third, sixth, and ninth hour. And about the eleventh hour, finding others standing idle, he said to them: “Why do you stand here idle all day?” And they answered: “No one hired us.” For no one called the multitude of the nations, except that alone in the last times the … of the vineyard …

“Behold, I prepare for you carbuncle as your stone, and your foundations sapphire, and I will make your battlements jasper, and your gates crystal, and your enclosure choice stones, and all your sons taught of God, and your children in great peace.”

See, I pray, again the artistry of the word and the ingenuity of the thoughts. For he speaks of the church from the nations as of a city soon to be seen, magnificent and most beautiful, … with stones of the most … For I will make, he says, carbuncle your stone.

He seems through these words to signify … Jesus, whom the sacred writing says was laid in the foundations of Zion, in whom, if anyone believes, he will not be put to shame. Here he names him carbuncle, but he is mentioned in other ways too through holy prophets. At any rate he said through the voice of Amos: “Behold, I set adamant in the midst of my people Israel.” And through the voice of Zechariah: “Behold, I bring my servant, the Dawn; for the stone which I have set before the face of Jesus: on the one stone are seven eyes.” For Christ, who oversees all, is able to see everything everywhere. The carbuncle, then, has been set as the stone and unshakable base of the holy city. On it are stones of sapphire, perhaps signifying the band of the holy apostles. For these are nearer to Christ, and after him became as it were foundations of the world under heaven. So David says somewhere in the seventeenth psalm: “The springs of the waters were seen, and the foundations of the world were uncovered, at your rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of your wrath.” For when those of Israel were rebuked and brought under the breath of the divine wrath, because they had raged against Christ, the springs of the waters were seen, that is, the cleansing through holy baptism, and the foundations of the world became manifest, that is again, the divine disciples, apostles and evangelists.

“And I will make,” he says, “your battlements jasper, and your gates stones of crystal, and your enclosure choice stones.” By battlements, gates, and enclosure he names the God-loving and most wise company of the holy initiators, who are bulwarks and gates of the holy city, its enclosure and wall. They fight those who wish to war against the city, that is, against those in it, the multitude of those saved through faith: they march out with good sense against the inventors of the unholy heresies and against the devil's perversities, … continually allowing no one to fall into his perversity; they bring in good order into the knowledge of God those who come from Greek deceit, and fence them about … so that they cannot be taken, and … wicked powers … pour the poison of knowledge falsely so called into the souls of the more simple. It is the custom of the inspired Scripture sometimes to liken to most costly stones those who have the holy life and are resplendent with manifold virtues. At any rate it said somewhere of the holy apostles that “holy stones roll upon the earth.” For the divine disciples went about the world under heaven, proclaiming and preaching to people everywhere the grace of salvation through Christ. And again the prophet Isaiah also said, as from the person of God: “And I will destroy the insolence of the lawless, and the insolence of the arrogant … more precious than unrefined gold, and man more precious than the stone from Sophir.”

For the leaders of the Jews perished, having transgressed against Christ; but those saved through faith would reasonably be reckoned more precious than all gold and stone. Indeed the all-wise Paul, calling Jesus Christ the foundation, says that those who have believed in him are built upon it as choice stones into a holy temple, into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. So he likens the holy initiators to the variety and spiritual beauty of the finest things, to the most precious stones; and some, he says, have been laid as foundations of the holy city, others as battlements, and others fill the need of gates and enclosure. These things concern those who preside over the city that the word paints for us. And what does he say about those who live in it? “And all your sons taught of God.” For of old he trained Israel through the all-wise Moses and the holy prophets; but in the last times of the age we have been taught by God. And of this Paul is witness, saying: “In many parts and in many ways God spoke of old to the fathers in the prophets; in these last days he has spoken to us in a Son.” For we have received as our teacher not some prophet acting as mediator and serving the words of God, as of old, but rather the Word himself, begotten of God the Father, who came to be in a form like ours and appeared in flesh. Therefore also the children of the church are in great peace, as our mother is built up in righteousness. For those who have become wholly taught of God none of those accustomed to empty talk could harm; they are at peace with God, bound together by love for him, and practise the ways of righteousness. And this builds up the church and secures its unshaken stability, as Christ defends it and grants it to stand unmoved. For “the gates of Hades,” he says, “shall not prevail against it.” For it is written also in the book of Psalms concerning it: “And he built his sanctuary like that of a unicorn; he founded it upon the earth forever.” We say that his sanctuary is the church, which also raises its horn, not to be cast down, against its enemies, as indeed the unicorn does against the other animals. For it has been founded forever by Christ.

“Keep away from the unjust, and you will not fear, and trembling will not come near you. Behold, proselytes will come to you through me, and will flee to you for refuge …”

… choice, and all her sons taught of God, he shows at once that what was promised has come to fulfilment. For he initiates, as it were, not through some mediator, as of old through Moses or the other holy prophets, but rather through himself, that is, by his own voice. For this was the saying: “They shall all be taught of God.” And the most wise Paul also wrote: “In many parts and in many ways God spoke of old to the fathers in the prophets; in these last days he has spoken to us in a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the ages.” So the maker of the ages himself weaves the initiation into the mysteries for those called by him to the grace that comes through faith. Therefore also the bride described in the Song of Songs says somewhere of him: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” For of old he greeted her, as it were, through the mouth of the holy prophets, calling her to union with himself through sanctification and righteousness. But when he came forth as man from a woman, … For he has spoken to us mouth to mouth. When, then, you keep away, he says, from every unjust and wicked deed, then you will not fear, and trembling will not come near you; for you will be impregnable to the enemies, and beyond … some of those in the world, having obtained a very great