All Saints Sunday (Year B)

The Lord consumes not food but elements of mourning, culminating in the swallowing of death itself

Raising of Lazarus by Peter Paul Morandell on the facade of the cemetery chapel in Rum, Tyrol (1956)
Photo of "Raising of Lazarus" by Peter Paul Morandell on the facade of the cemetery chapel in Rum, Tyrol (1956) via Wikimedia Commons; licensed under CC0.

November 3, 2024

First Reading
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Commentary on Isaiah 25:6-9



The art of preaching biblical poems might helpfully involve being captivated by an image that shapes the imagination.1 In Isaiah 25:6–9, the mountain feast dominates the poem’s vision. It has the capacity to “figure the mind”2 with an expectation of divine power, goodness, generosity, and abundance. Its vision merits consideration in how we embrace the future in the context of the feast of All Saints.

The mountain feast is attention-grabbing. Perhaps in our contemporary world of fast food and cheap produce,3 we do not hear the promise of a mountain feast to which “all peoples” are invited quite so potently as the poem’s announcement expresses it. Famine and scarcity are part of the world of the Bible, a world in which food security was clearly more tenuous than we commonly perceive it to be.

Patriarchs and matriarchs migrate in the context of famine (for example, Genesis 12:10; 26:1). The land of promise is repeatedly a place “flowing with milk and honey” (for example, Exodus 3:8; Leviticus 20:24; Deuteronomy 6:3). Warfare decimates food supply, and hunger is an image of suffering (for example, Deuteronomy 28:48; Lamentations 2:12). The biblical world knows the miracle of “seedtime and harvest” (Genesis 8:22), and it embraces the reality that food arrives on our plates “by the sweat of [our] face” (Genesis 3:19).

A pair of lines carries the intensity of the feast image in their pattern and their sound. Here, heavily alliterated sound emphatically announces the divinely given banquet and underscores its expansiveness. The first line of the pair employs repetitive m and š sounds in “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines.” The second line of the pair expands the sound by repeating and augmenting each of the words the first line had paired with “feast” and employing further repetitive sound patterning in the phrase translated “of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.”

The vision is one of overwhelming abundance, of the richest and finest fare “made” by the Lord “on this mountain” (verse 6).

The location “on this mountain” reappears in verse 7, linking the location of the feast “for all peoples” with the location where the Lord will consume destruction and death. All the activity at this point in the poem is the Lord’s. The peoples are presented with food in this vision, but instead of focusing on their eating, the poem’s vision moves on to another who “eats” something quite different.

The Lord consumes not food but elements of mourning, culminating in the swallowing of death itself. Each of verses 7 and 8 begins with the verb billaʿ (“swallow”), frequently translated “destroy” in verse 7 (for example, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, New International Version, Jewish Publication Society). It carries connotations of total obliteration (for example, Numbers 16). In Isaiah’s mountain-feast image, the repetitive use of “swallow” links the rich feast with the obliteration of deathliness.

The poetics of this poem drive home the exhaustiveness of what God eradicates from human experience. Between the lines that announce that the Lord will swallow “on this mountain” (verse 7) and that “he will swallow up death” (verse 8), a neatly matched line pair drives home the images of “shroud” and “covering that is spread” with repeated and redoubled forms carrying emphasis in their alliteration.

Each of these lines ends with an expansive image: “over all peoples” and “over all nations,” mirroring one another in perfect parallel repetition, with the word “peoples/nations” the only divergence between them. The poem’s development of the swallowing image embraces expansive images of items associated with death, driving home its extension to the whole human race, prior to the culminating announcement “he will swallow up death forever” (verse 8).

The poem turns from announcement of the coming feast, given its assurance in the claim that “the LORD has spoken” (verse 8), to what will “be said” (verse 9). The response ties waiting for God to deliverance. This embrace of God’s deliverance connects waiting to joy. The people do not accomplish their salvation. They wait for it, and they rejoice in it.

Action in this poem is God’s. The feast is one that spreads out good things in abundance and with lavish expansiveness. All peoples are invited. The menu is cosmic. God will “swallow up death” and “wipe away … tears” (verse 8). Feasting becomes an image of utter transformation of all that threatens and diminishes humanity. Tears and disgrace are done away with as the imagery dissolves into expressions of praise.

All Saints invites us to look forward into God’s good future while giving thanks for the faithfulness of God’s servants of the past. Our moment is one characterized by the groaning of creation (Romans 8:19–25). We have seen firsthand the threat to the global food supply through war and climate change. Yet many in our congregations will be among the least directly impacted. We continue to benefit from an unjust global food economy. Scarcity and hunger are disproportionately shared in our world, and this passage’s repeated emphasis on the feast that is for “all peoples” might usefully chasten our over-comfort and ignorance about where our own feasting is furrowed and farmed.4

The good news of the coming feast of God’s good future is best appreciated when we hunger for the righting of these wrongs. Its lavish vision has the capacity to awaken in us a longing for God’s world made whole, for the banishment of tears and of hunger. It might invite us to wait, not passively but expectantly, hopefully.


Notes

  1. See the comments of Ellen F. Davis, Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 24.
  2. This language is that of Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 298.
  3. See Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in What I Stand For Is What I Stand On (Milton Keynes: Penguin, 2017), 22–25.
  4. For description of such lack of awareness see Berry, “Pleasures of Eating,” 22–23.